The Renaissance

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THE

Renaissance

BY WALTER PATER

Introduction by ARTHUR SYMONS

THE

MODERN LIBRARY

NEW YORK

Random House is THE PUBLISHER OF

THE MODERN LIBRARY

BENNETT A. CEHF DONALD 8. KLOPFER ROBERT K. HAAS

Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed by Parkway Printing Company Bound by H. Wolff

DEDICATION

TO

C. L. S.

FEBRUARY 1873

CONTENTS

PAGE

Two EARLY FRENCH STORIES i

Pico DELLA MIRANDOLA . 24

SANDRO BOTTICELLI 41

-'.'.-*#, .

LTJCA DELLA ROBBIA " . . 53

THE POETRY v OF MICHELANGELO 60

LEONARDO DA VINCI 81

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE ....... 107

JOACHIM Du BELLAY 128

WlNCKELMANN 147

CONCLUSION 194

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION
BY ARTHUR SYMONS

WRITING about Botticelli, in that essay which first in-
terpreted Botticelli to the modern world, Pater said, after
naming the supreme artists, Michelangelo or Leonardo :

But, besides these great men, there is a certain number
of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by
which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure
which we cannot get elsewhere ; and these, too, have their
place in general culture, and must be interpreted to it by
those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often
the objects of a special diligence and a consideration
wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them
the stress of a great name and authority.

It is among these rare artists, so much more interest-
ing, to many, than the very greatest, that Pater be-
longs ; and he can only be properly understood, loved, or
even measured by those to whom it is "the delicacies of
fine literature" that chiefly appeal. There have been
greater prose writers in our language, even in our time ;
but he was, as Mallarme called him, *'le prosateur ouvrag<
par excellence de ce temps." For strangeness and subt-
lety of teniperament, for rarity and delicacy of form, for
something incredibly attractive to those who felt his at-
traction, he was as unique in our age as BotticelK in the
great age of Raphael. And he, too, above all to those

xii INTRODUCTION

who knew him, can scarcely fail to become, not only "the
object of a special diligence," but also of "a considera-
tion wholly affectionate/' not lessened by the slowly in-
creasing "stress of authority" which is coming to be
laid, almost by the world in general, on his name.

In the work of Pater, thought moves to music, and
does all its hard work as if in play. And Pater seems
to listen for his thought, and to overhear it, as the poet
overhears his song in the air. It is like music, and has
something of the character of poetry, yet, above all, it is
precise, individual thought filtered through a tempera-
ment; and it comes to us as it does because the style
which clothes and fits it is a style in which, to use some of
his own words, "the writer succeeds in saying what he
wills."

The style of Pater has been praised and blamed Jor its
particular qualities of color, harmony, weaving ; but it has
not always, or often, been realised that what is most won-
derful in the style is precisely its adaptability to every
shade of meaning or intention, its extraordinary closeness
in following the turns of thought, the waves of sensation,
in the man himself. Everything in Pater was in har-
mony, when you got accustomed to its particular forms
of expression: the heavy frame, so slow and deliberate
in movement, so settled in repose; the timid and yet
scrutinizing eyes; the mannered, yet so personal, voice;
the precise, pausing speech, with its urbanity, its almost
painful conscientiousness of utterance; the whole outer
mask, in short, worn for protection and out of courtesy,
yet molded upon the inner truth of nature like a mask
molded upon the features which it covers. And the
books are the man, literally the man in many accents,

INTRODUCTION xiii

/

turns of phrase ; and, far more than that, the man him-
self, whom one felt through his few, friendly, intimate,
serious words : the inner life of his soul coming close to
us, in a slow and gradual revelation.

He has said, in the first essay of his which we have:

The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of
art desires only to be shown to the world as he really is ;
as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of
an outer life, not simply expressive of the inward, be-
comes thinner and thinner.

And Pater seemed to draw up into himself every form
of earthly beauty, or of the beauty made by men, and
many forms of knowledge and wisdom, and a sense of
human things which was neither that of the lover nor of
the priest, but partly of both; and his work was the
giving out of all this again, with a certain labor to give
it wholly. It is all, the criticism, and the stories, and
the writing about pictures and places, a confession, the
vraie verite (as he was fond of saying) about the world
in which he lived. That world he thought was open to
all ; he was sure that it was the real blue and green earth,
and that he caught the tangible moments as they passed.

It was a world into which we can only look, not enter,
for none of us have his secret. But part of his secret
was in the gift and cultivation of a passionate temperance,
an unrelaxing attentiveness to whatever was rarest and
most delightful in passing things.

In Pater logic is of the nature of ecstasy, and ecstasy
never soars wholly beyond the reach of logic. Pater is
keen in pointing out the liberal and spendthrift weakness
of Coleridge in his thirst for the absolute, his "hunger

xiv INTRODUCTION

for eternity," and for his part he is content to set all his
happiness, and all his mental energies, on a relative basis,
on a valuation of the things of eternity under the form
of time. He asks for no "larger flowers" than the best
growth of the earth ; but he would choose them flower by
flower, and for himself. He finds life worth just living,
a thing satisfying in essence, moment by moment, not in
any calculated "hedonism," even of the mind, but in a
quiet discriminating acceptance of whatever is beautiful,
active, or illuminating in every moment. As he grew
older he added something more like a Stoic sense of
"duty" to the old, properly and severely Epicurean doc-
trine of "pleasure." Pleasure was never, for Pater, less
than the essence of all knowledge, all experience, and not
merely all that is rarest in sensation; it was religious
from the first, and had always to be served with a strict
ritual. "Only be sure it is passion," he said of that
spirit of divine motion to which he appealed for the
quickening of our sense of life, our sense of ourselves;
be sure, he said, "that it does yield you this fruit of a
quickened, multiplied consciousness." What he cared most
for at all times was that which could give "the highest
quality to our moments as they pass" ; he diff ered only,
to a certain extent, in his estimation of what that was.
"The herb, the wine, the gem" of the preface to the
"Renaissance" tended more and more to become, under
less outward symbols of perfection, "the discovery, the
new faculty, the privileged apprehension" by which "the
imaginative regeneration of the world" should be brought
about, or even, at times, a brooding over "what the soul
passes, and must pass, through, aux abois with nothing-

INTRODUCTION xv

ness, or with those offended mysterious powers that may
really occupy it."

When I first met Pater he was nearly fifty. I did not
meet him for about two years after he had been writing
to me, and his first letter reached me when I was just
over twenty-one. I had been writing verse all my life,
and what Browning was to me in verse Pater, from
about the age, of seventeen, had been to me in prose.
Meredith made the third; but his form of art was not,
I knew never could be, mine. Verse, I suppose, requires
no teaching, but it was from reading Pater's "Studies in
the History of the Renaissance," in its first edition on
ribbed paper (I have the feel of it still in my fingers),
that I realized that prose also could be a fine art. That
book opened a new world to me, or, rather, gave me the
key or secret of the world in which I was living. It
taught me that there was a beauty besides the beauty of
what one calls inspiration, and comes and goes, and can-
not be caught or followed; that life (which had seemed
to me of so little moment) could be itself a work of
art; from that book I realized for the first time that
there was anything interesting or vital in the world be-
sides poetry and music. I caught from it an unlimited
curiosity, or, at least, the direction of curiosity into defi-
nite channels.

The knowledge that there was such a person as Pater
in the world, an occasional letter from him, an occa-
sional meeting, and gradually, the definite encouragement
of my work in which, for some years, he was unfailingly
generous and attentive, meant more to me, at that time,
than I can well indicate, or even realize, now. It was
through him that my first volume of verse was published ;

xvi INTRODUCTION

and it was through his influence and counsels that 1
trained myself to be infinitely careful in all matters of
literature. Influence and counsel were always in the di-
rection of sanity, restraint, precision.

I remember a beautiful phrase which he once made up,
in his delaying way, with "wells" and "no doubts" in it,
to describe, and to describe supremely a person whom
I had seemed to him to be disparaging. "He does," he
said meditatively, "remind me of, well, of a steam-engine
stuck in the mud. But he is so enthusiastic." Pater
liked people to be enthusiastic, but, with him, enthusiasm
was an ardent quietude, guarded by the wary humor that
protects the sensitive. He looked upon undue earnest-
ness, even in outward manner, in a world through which
the artist is bound to go on a wholly "secret errand," as
bad form, which shocked him as much in persons as bad
style did in books. -He hated every form of extravagance,
noise, mental of physical, with a temperamental hatred : he
suffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he
had no less dislike of whatever seemed to him either
morbid or sordid, two words which he often used to ex-
press his distaste for things and people. He never* would
have appreciated writers like Verlaine, because of what
seemed to him perhaps unnecessarily "sordid" in their
lives. It pained him, as it pains some people, perhaps
only because they are more acutely sensitive than others,
to walk through mean streets, where people are poor,
miserable, and hopeless.

And since I have mentioned Verlaine, I may say that
what Pater most liked in poetry was the very opposite
of such work as that of Verlaine, which he might have
been supposed likely to like. I do not think it was actu-

INTRODUCTION xvii

ally one of Verlaine's poems, but something done after
his manner in English, that some reviewer once quoted,
saying: "That, to our mind, would be Mr. Pater's ideal
of poetry." Pater said to me, with a sad wonder, "I
simply don't know what he meant." What he liked in
poetry was something even more definite than can be got
in prose ; and he valued poets like Dante and like Ros-
setti for their "delight in concrete definition," not even
quite seeing the ultimate magic of such things as Kubla
Khan, which he omitted in a brief selection from the
poetry of Coleridge. In the most interesting letter which
I ever had from him, the only letter which went to six
pages, he says:

12 Earl's Terrace,

Kensington, W.

Jan. 8, 1888.

My dear Mr. Symons, I feel much flattered at your
choosing me as an arbiter in the matter of your literary
work, and thank you for the pleasure I have had in read-
ing carefully the two poems you have sent me. I don't
use the word "arbiter" loosely for "critic"; but suppose
a real controversy, on the question whether you shall
spend your best energies in writing verse, between your
poetic aspirations on the one side, and prudence (calcu-
lating results) on the other. Well! judging by these two
pieces, I should say that you have a poetic talent re-
markable, especially at the present day, for precise and
intellectual grasp on the matter it deals with. Rossetti,
I believe, said that the value of every artistic product
was in direct proportion to the amount of purely intel-
lectual force that went to the initial conception of it:
and it is just this intellectual conception which seems to
me to be so conspicuously wanting in what, in some
ways, is the most characteristic verse of our time, espe-
cially that of our secondary poets. In your own pieces,
particularly in your MS. "A Revenge," I find Rossetti's

xviii INTRODUCTION

requirement fulfilled, and should anticipate great things
from one who has the talent of conceiving his motive
with so much firmness and tangibility with that close
logic, if I may say so, which is an element in any genu-
inely imaginative process. It is clear to me that you aim
at this, and it is what gives your verses, to my mind, great
interest. Otherwise, I think the two pieces of unequal
excellence, greatly preferring "A Revenge" to "Bell in
Camp." Reserving some doubt whether the watch, as the
lover's gift, is not a little bourgeois, I think this piece
worthy of any poet. It has that aim of concentration and
organic unity which I value greatly both in prose and
verse. "Bell in Camp" pleases me less, for the same
reason which makes me put Rossetti's "Jenny," and some
of Browning's pathetic-satiric pieces, below the rank
which many assign them. In no one of the poems I am
thinking of, is the inherent sordidness of everything in
the persons supposed, except the one poetic trait then un-
der treatment, quite forgotten. Otherwise, I feel the
pathos, the humor, of the piece (in the full sense of the
word humor) and the skill with which you have worked
out your motive therein. I think the present age an un-
favorable one to poets, at least in England. The young
poet comes into a generation which has produced a large
amount of first-rate poetry, and an enormous amount of
good secondary poetry. You know I give a high place
to the literature of prose as a fine art, and therefore hope
you won't think me brutal in saying that the admirable
qualities of your verse are those also of imaginative
prose ; as I think is the case also with much of Brown-
ing's finest verse. I should say, make prose your prin-
cipal metier, as a man of letters, and publish your verse
as a more intimate gift for those who already value you
for your pedestrian work in literature. I should think
you ought to find no difficulty in finding a publisher for
poems such as those you have sent to me.

I am more than ever anxious to meet you. Letters are
such poor means of communication. Don't come to Lon-

INTRODUCTION xix

don without making an appointment to come and see me
here. Very sincerely yours,

Walter Pater.

"Browning, one of my best-loved writers," is a phrase
I find in his first letter to me, in December, 1886, thank-
ing me for a little book on Browning which I had just
published. There is, I think, no mention of any other
writer except Shakespeare (besides the reference to Ros-
setti which I have just quoted) in any of the fifty or sixty
letters which I have from him. Everything that is said
about books is a direct matter of business: work which
he was doing, of which he tells me, or which I was doing,
about which he advises and encourages me.

In practical things Pater was wholly vague, troubled
by their persistence when they pressed upon him. To
wrap up a book to send by post was an almost intolerable
effort, and he had another reason for hesitating. "I take
your copy of Shakespeare's sonnets with me/' he writes
in June, 1889, "hoping to be able to restore, it to you
there lest it should get bruised by transit through thd
post." He wrote letters with distaste, never really well,
and almost always with excuses or regrets in them : "Am
so overburdened (my time, I mean) just now with pupils,
lectures, and the making thereof" ; or, with hopes for a
meeting: "Letters are such poor means of communica-
tion : when are we to meet ?" or, as a sort of hasty make-
shift : "I send this prompt answer, for I know by experi-
ence that when I delay my delays are apt to be lengthy."
A review took him sometimes a year to get through and
remained in the end, like his letters, a little cramped,
never finished to the point of ease, like his published

xx INTRODUCTION

writings. To lecture was a great trial to him. Two of
the three lectures which I have heard in my life were
given by Pater, one on Merimee, at the London Institu-
tion, in November, 1890, and the other on Raphael, at
Toynbee Hall, in 1892. I never saw a man suffer a
severer humiliation. The act of reading his written lec-
ture was an agony which communicated itself to the main
part of the audience. Before going into the hall at White-
chapel he had gone into a church to compose his mind a
little, between the discomfort of the underground rail-
way and the distress of the lecture-hall.

In a room, if he was not among very intimate friends,
Pater was rarely quite at his ease, but he liked being
among people, and he made the greater satisfaction over-
come the lesser reluctance. He was particularly fond of
cats, and I remember one evening, when I had been din-
ing with him in London, the quaint, solemn, and perfectly
natural way in which he took up the great black Per-
sian, kissed it, and set it down carefully again on his
way upstairs. Once at Oxford he told me that M. Bour-
get had sent him the first volume of his Essais de Psy-
chologie Contemporaine, and that the cat had got hold of
the book and torn up the part containing the essay on
Baudelaire, "and as Baudelaire was such a lover of cats
I thought she might have spared him!"

We were talking once about fairs, and I had been say-
ing how fond I was of them. He said : "I am fond of
them, too. I always go to fairs. I am getting to find they
are very similar." Then he began to tell me about the
fairs in France, and I remember, as if it were an un-
published fragment in one of his stories, the minute,
colored impression of the booths, the little white horses

INTRODUCTION xxf

of the "roundabouts," and the little wild beast shows, in
which what had most struck him was the interest of the
French peasant in the wolf, a creature he might have
seen in his own woods. "An English clown would not
have looked at a wolf if he could have seen a tiger."

I once asked Pater if his family was really connected
with that of the painter, Jean-Baptiste Pater. He said:
"I think so, I believe so, I always say so." The rela-
tionship has never been verified, but one would like to
believe it; to find something lineally Dutch in the Eng-
lish writer. It was, no doubt, through this kind of
family interest that he came to work upon Goncourt's
essay and the contemporary Life of Watteau by the
Count de Caylus, printed in the first series of L'Art du
XVIII Siecle, out of which he has made certainly the
most living of his Imaginary Portraits, that Prince of
Court Painters which is supposed to be the journal of a
sister of Jean-Baptiste Pater, whom we see in one of
Watteau's portraits in the Louvre. As far back as 1889 *
Pater was working towards a second volume of Imagi-
nary Portraits of which Hippolytus Veiled was to have
been one. He had another subject in Moroni's Portrait
of a Tailor in the National Gallery, whom he was going
to make a Burgomaster; and another was to have been
a study of life in the time of the Albigensian persecution.
There was also to be a. modern study: could this have
been Emerald Uthwart? No doubt Apollo in Picardy,

1 In this same year he intended to follow the Appreciations by
a volume of Studies of Greek Remains, in which he then mear,t
to include the studies in Platonism, not yet written; and he
thought of putting together a volume of "theory," which was to
include the essay on Style. In two or three years' time, h*
thought, Gaston de Latour would be finished.

xxii INTRODUCTION

published in 1893, would have gone into the volume. The
Child in the House, which was printed as an Imaginary
Portrait, in Macmillaris Magazine in 1878, was really
meant to be the first chapter of a romance which was to
show "the poetry of modern life," something, he said,
as Aurora Leigh does. There is much personal detail in
it, the red hawthorn, for instance, and he used to talk tc
me of the old house at Tunbridge, where his great-aunt
lived, and where he spent much of his time when a child.
He remembered the gipsies there, and their caravans,
when they came down for the hop-picking; and the old
lady in her large cap going out on the lawn to do battle
with the surveyors who had come to mark out a rail*
way across it; and his terror of the train, and of "the
red flag, which meant blood." It was because he always
dreamed of going on with it that he did not reprint
this imaginary portrait in the book of Imaginary Por-
traits, but he did not go on with it because, having begun
the long labor of Marius, it was out of his mind for
many years, and when, in 1889, he still spoke of finishing
it, he was conscious that he could never continue it in the
same style, and that it would not be satisfactory to re-
write it in his severer, later manner. It remains, per-
haps fortunately, a fragment, to which no continuation
could ever add a more essential completeness.

Style, in Pater, varied mote than is generally sup-
posed, in the course of his development, and, though
never thought of as a thing apart from what it expresses,
was with him a constant preoccupation. Let writers, he
said, "make time to write English more as a learned lan-
guage." It has been said that Ruskin, De Quincey, and
Flaubert were among the chief "origins" of Pater's style ;

INTRODUCTION xxiii

it is curiously significant that matter, in Pater, was de-
veloped before style, and that in the bare and angular
outlines of the earliest fragment, Diaphan&itt, there is
already the substance which is to be clothed upon by
beautiful and appropriate flesh in the Studies in the Re-
naissance. Ruskin, I never heard him mention, but I
do not doubt that there, to the young man beginning to
concern himself with beauty in art and literature, was
at least a quickening influence. Of De Quincey he spoke
with an admiration which I had difficulty in sharing,
and I remember his showing me with pride a set of his
works bound in half-parchment, with pale gold letter-
ing on the white backs, and with the cinnamon edges
which he was so fond of. Of Flaubert we rarely met
without speaking. He thought Julien FHospitalier as
perfect as anything he had done. L'Education Senti-
mentale was one of the books which he advised me to
read; that, and Le Rouge et le Noir of Stendhal; and
he spoke with particular admiration of two episodes in
the former, the sickness and the death of the child. Of
the Goncourts he spoke with admiration tempered by
dislike. Their books often repelled him, yet their way of
doing things seemed to him just the way things should
be done; and done before almost any one eke. He often
read Madame Gervaisais, and he spoke of Cherie (for all
its "immodesty") as an admirable thing, and a model for
all such studies.

Once, as we were walking in Oxford, he pointed to
a window and said, with a slow smile : "That is where I
get my Zolas." He was always a little on his guard in
respect -of books ; and, just as he read Flaubert and Gon-
court because they were intellectual neighbors, so he

xxiv INTRODUCTION

could read Zola for mere pastime, knowing that there
would be nothing there to distract him. I remember
telling him about The Story of an African Farm, and of
the wonderful human quality in it. He said, repeating his
favorite formula: "No doubt you are quite right; but
I do not suppose I shall ever read it." And he explained
to me that he was always writing something, and that
while he was writing he did not allow himself to read
anything which might possibly affect him too strongly,
by bringing a new current of emotion to bear upon him.
He was quite content that his mind should "keep as a
solitary prisoner its own dream of a world" ; it was that
prisoner's dream of a world that it was his whole busi-
ness as a writer to remember, to perpetuate.

PREFACE

MANY attempts have been made by writers on art
and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it
in the most general terms, to find some universal for-
mula for it. The value of these attempts has most often
been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the
way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what
has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate be-
tween what is more and what is less excellent in them,
or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with
a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.
Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human ex-
perience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes
unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness.
To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the
most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal
formula, but the formula which expresses most ade-
quately this or that special manifestation of it, is the
aim of the true student of aesthetics.

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been
justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever;
and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing
one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impres-
sion as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it dis-
tinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism
deals music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms
of human life are indeed receptacles of so many

xxv

XXVI

PREFACE

powers or forces: they possess, like the products of
nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song
or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or
in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce
on me ? Does it give me pleasure ? and if so, what sort
or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by
its presence, and under its influence? The answers to
these questions are the original facts with which the
aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light,
of morals, of number, one must realise such primary
data for one's self, or not at all. And he who experi-
ences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at
the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to
trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty
is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experi-
ence metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as meta-
physical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by
as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

Trie aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with
which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer
forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces
producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less
peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and
wishes to explain, by analysing and reducing it to its
elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the en-
gaging personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda,
the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable
for their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb,
a wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting
one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure.
Our education becomes complete in proportion as our
susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and

PREFACE 'xxvii

variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to
distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts,
the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair per-
sonality in life or in a book, produces this special im-
pression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the
source of that impression is, and under what conditions
it is experienced. His end is reached when he has dis-
engaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes
some natural element, for himself and others; and the
rule for those who would reach this end is stated with
great exactness in the words of a recent critic of Sainte-
Beuve: De se borner & connaitre de pres les belles
choses, et d J en nourrir en exquis amateurs, en hu-
manistes accomplis.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should
possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the
intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power
of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful
objects. He will remember always that beauty exists
in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools of
taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have
been some excellent workmen, and some excellent work
done. The question he asks is always: In whom did
the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find
itself? where was the receptacle of its refinement, its
elevation, its taste? "The ages are all equal," says
William Blake, "but genius is always above its age."

Often it will require great nicety to disengage this
virtue from the commoner elements with which it may
be found in combination. Few artists, not Goethe or
Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all debris,
and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination

xxviii PREFACE

has w,holly fused and transformed. Take, for instance,
the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius,
entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised
a part, but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of
verse there is much which might well be forgotten. But
scattered up and down it, sometimes fusing and trans-
forming entire compositions, like the Stanzas on Resolu-
tion and Independence, or the Ode on the Recollections
of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random, depositing a
fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly
search through and transmute, we trace the action of
his unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystic-
al sense of a life in natural things, and of man's life
as a part of nature, drawing strength and color and
character from local influences, from the hills and
streams, and from natural sights and sounds. Well!
that is the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth's
poetry; and then the function of the critic of Words-
worth is to follow up that active principle, to disengage
it, to mark the degree in which it penetrates his verse.

The subjects of the following studies are taken from
the history of the Renaissance, and touch what I think
the chief points in that complex, many-sided movement.
I have explained in the first of them what I understand
by the word, giving it a much wider scope than was
intended by those who originally used it to denote that
revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century
which was only one of many results of a general excite-
ment and enlightening of the human mind, but of whicl
the great aim and achievements of what, as Christian
art, is often falsely opposed to the Renaissance, were
another result. This outbreak of the human spirit may

PREFACE xxix

be traced far into the middle age itself, with its motives
already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty,
the worship of the body, the breaking down of those
limits which the religious system of the middle age im-
posed on the heart and the imagination. I have taken,
as an example of this movement, this earlier Renais-
sance within the middle age itself, and as an expression
of its qualities, two little compositions in early French;
not because they constitute the best possible expression
of them, but because they help the unity of my series,
inasmuch as the Renaissance ends also in France, in
French poetry, in a phase of which the writings of
Joachim du Bellay are in many ways the most perfect
illustration. The Renaissance, in truth, put forth in
France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the
products of which have to the full that subtle and deli-
cate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely
decadence, just as its earliest phases have the freshness
which belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm
of asdesis, of the austere and serious girding of the
loins in youth.

But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the
interest of the Renaissance mainly lies, in that solemn
fifteenth century which can hardly be studied too much,
not merely for its positive results in the things of the
intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art,
ks special and prominent personalities, with their pro-
found aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and
character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a con-
summate type.

The various forms of intellectual activity which to-
gether make up the culture of an age, move for the most

xxx PREFACE

part from different starting-points, and by unconnected
roads. As products of the same generation they par-
take indeed of a common character, and unconsciously
illustrate each other; but of the producers themselves,
each group is solitary, gaining what advantage or dis-
advantage there may be in intellectual isolation. Art
and poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that
other life of refined pleasure and action in the conspicu-
ous places of the world, are each of them confined to
its own circle of ideas, and those who prosecute either
of them are generally little curious of the thoughts of
others. There come, however, from time to time, eras
of more favorable conditions, in which the thoughts of
men draw nearer together than is their wont, and the
many interests of the intellectual world combine in one
complete type of general culture. The fifteenth century
in Italy is one of these happier eras, and what is some-
times said of the age of Pericles is true of that of
Lorenzo : it is an age productive in personalities,
many-sided, centralised, complete. Here, artists and
philosophers and those whom the action of the world
has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but
breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from
each other's thoughts. There is a spirit of general eleva-
tion and enlightenment in which all alike communicate.
The unity of this spirit gives unity to all the various
products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate
alliance with mind, this participation in the best-thoughts
which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the
fifteenth century owes much of its grave dignity and
influence.

I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not in-

PREFACE xxxi

congruous with the studies which precede it, because
Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth century, really
belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm
for the things of the intellect and the imagination for
their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle
to attain to the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the
humanists of a previous century. He is the last fruit
of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its
motive and tendencies.

1873.

Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove.

THE RENAISSANCE

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES

THE history of the Renaissance ends in France, and
carries us away from Italy to the beautiful cities of the
country of the Loire. But it was in France also, in a
very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun.
French writers, who are fond of connecting the crea-
tions of Italian genius with a French origin, who tell
us how Saint Francis of Assisi took not his name only,
but all those notions of chivalry and romantic love
which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French
source, how Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his
stories from the old French fabliaux, and how Dante
himself expressly connects the origin of the art of minia-
ture-painting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt
on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth
and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renais-
sance within the limits of the middle age itself a bril-
liant, but in part abortive effort to do for human life
and the human mind what was afterwards done in the
fifteenth. The word Renaissance, indeed, is now gener-
ally used to denote not merely the revival of classical
antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century, and
to which the word was first applied, but a whole com-
plex movement, of which that revival of classical an-
tiquity was but one element or symptom. For us the
Renaissance is the name of a many-sided but yet united
- i

2 THE RENAISSANCE

movement, in which the love of the things of the intel-
lect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire
for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life,
make themselves felt, urging those who experience this
desire to search out first one and then another means of
intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directing them
not only to the discovery of old and forgotten sources
of this enjoyment, but to the divination of fresh sources
thereof new experiences, new subjects of poetry, new
forms of art. Of such feeling there was a great out-
break in the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the
following century. Here and there, under rare and
happy conditions, in Pointed architecture, in the doc-
trines of romantic love, in the poetry of Provence, the
rude strength of the middle age turns to sweetness ; and
the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed
of the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to
seek after the springs of perfect sweetness in the Hel-
lenic world. And coming after a long period in which
this instinct had been crushed, that true "dark age," in
which so many sources of intellectual and imaginative
enjoyment had actually disappeared, this outbreak is
rightly called a Renaissance, a revival.

Theories which bring into connection with each other
modes of thought and feeling, periods of taste, forms of
art and poetry, which the narrowness of men's minds
constantly tends to oppose to each other, have a great
stimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth
understanding. It is so with this theory of a Renais-
sance within the middle age, which seeks to establish a
continuity between the most characteristic work of that
period, the sculpture of Chartres, the windows of Le

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 3

Mans, and the work of the later Renaissance, the work
of Jean Cousin and Germain Pilon, thus healing that
rupture between the middle age and the Renaissance
which has so often been exaggerated. But it is not so
much the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculp-
ture and painting work certainly done in a great meas-
ure for pleasure's sake, in which even a secular, a rebel-
lious spirit often betrays itself but rather its profane
poetry, the poetry of Provence, and the magnificent
after-growth of that poetry in Italy and France, which
those French writers have in view when they speak of
this medieval Renaissance. In that poetry, earthly pas-
sion, with its intimacy, its freedom, its variety the lib-
erty of the heart makes itself felt; and the name of
Abelard, the great scholar and the great lover, connects
the expression of this liberty of heart with the free play
of human intelligence around all subjects presented to
it, with the liberty of the intellect, as that age under-
stood it.

Every one knows the legend of Abelard, a legend
hardly less passionate, certainly not less characteristic
of the middle age, than the legend of Tannhauser; how
the famous and comely clerk, in whom Wisdom her-
self, self-possessed, pleasant, and discreet, seemed to sit
enthroned, came to live in the house of a canon of the
church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girl, Heloise, be-
lieved to be the old priest's orphan niece; how the old
priest had testified his love for her by giving her an
education then unrivalled, so that rumor asserted that,
through the knowledge of languages, enabling her to
penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had
become a sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how

4 THE RENAISSANCE

as Abelard and Heloise sat together at home there, to
refine a little further on the nature of abstract ideas,
"Love made himself of the party with them." You
conceive the temptations of the scholar, who, in such'
dreamy tranquillity, amid the bright and busy spectacle
of the "Island," lived in a world of something like
shadows; and that for one who knew so well how to
assign its exact value to every abstract thought, those
restraints which lie on the consciences of other men
had been relaxed. It appears that he composed many
verses in the vulgar tongue : already the young men sang
them on the quay below the house. Those songs, says
M. de Remusat, were probably in the taste of the
Trouvtres, "of whom he was one of the first in date,
or, so to speak, the predecessor." It is the same spirit
which has molded the famous "letters," written in the
quaint Latin of the middle age.

At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which the
next generation raised to grace the precincts of Abe-
lard's school, on the "Mountain of Saint Genevieve,"
the historian Michelet sees in thought "a terrible assem-
bly; not the hearers of Abelard alone, fifty bishops,
twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of scho-
lastic philosophy; not only the learned Heloise, the
teaching of languages, and the Renaissance ; but Arnold
of Brescia that is to say, the revolution." And so from
the rooms of this shadowy house by the Seine side we
see that spirit going abroad, with its qualities already
well defined, its intimacy, its languid sweetness, its re-
bellion, its subtle skill in dividing the elements of human
passion, its care for physical beauty, its worship of the

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 5

body, which penetrated the early literature of Italy, and
finds an echo even in Dante.

That Abelard is not mentioned in the Divine Comedy
may appear a singular omission to the reader of Dante,
who seems to have inwoven into the texture of his work
whatever had impressed him as either effective in color
or spiritually significant among the recorded incidents
of actual life. Nowhere in his great poem do we find
the name, nor so much as an allusion to the story of
one who had left so deep a mark on the philosophy of
which Dante was an eager student, of whom in the
Latin Quarter, and from the lips of scholar or teacher
in the University of Paris, during his sojourn among
them, he can hardly have failed to hear. We can only
suppose that he had indeed considered the story and the
man, and abstained from passing judgment as to his
place in the scheme of "eternal justice." v

In the famous legend of Tannhauser, the erring
knight makes his way to Rome, to seek absolution at
the centre of Christian religion. "So soon/' thought and
said the Pope, "as the staff in his hand should bud and
blossom, so soon might the soul of Tannhauser be saved t
and no sooner" ; and it came to pass not long after that
the dry wood of a staff which the Pope had carried in
his hand was covered with leaves and flowers. So, in
the cloister of Godstow, a petrified tree was shown of
which the nuns told that the fair Rosamond, who had
died among them, had declared that, the tree being then
alive and green, it would be changed into stone at the
hour of her salvation. When Abelard died, like Tann-
hauser, he was on his way to Rome. What might have
happened had he reached his journey's end is uncertain;,

6 THE RENAISSANCE

and it is in this uncertain twilight that his relation to
the general beliefs of his age has always remained. In
this, as in other things, he prefigures the character of
the Renaissance, that movement in which, in various
ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom
of feeling and sensation and thought, not opposed to
but only beyond and independent of the spiritual sys-
tem then actually realised. The opposition into which
Abelard is thrown, which gives its color to his career,
which breaks his soul to pieces, is a no less subtle op-
position than that between the merely professional, offi-
cial, hireling ministers of that system, with their ig-
norant worship of system for its own sake, and the true
child of light, the humanist, with reason and heart and
senses quick, while theirs were almost dead. He reaches
out towards, he attains, modes of ideal living, beyond
the prescribed limits of that system, though in essential
germ, it may be, contained within it. As always hap-
pens, the adherents of the poorer and narrower culture
had no sympathy with, because no understanding of, a
culture richer and more ample than their own. After
the discovery of wheat they would still live upon acorns
aprcs Tinventlon du blc voulaient encore vivre du
gland; and would hear of no service to the higher needs
of humanity with instruments not of their forging.

But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was
too strong for them. Abelard and Hclo'ise write their
letters letters with a wonderful outpouring of soul
in medieval Latin ; and Abelard, though he composes
songs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those
treatises in which he tries to find a ground of reality
below the abstractions of philosophy, as one bent on

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 7

trying all things by their congruity with human experi-
ence, who had felt the hand of Heloise, and looked into
her eyes, and tested the resources of humanity in her
great and energetic nature. Yet it is only a little later,
early in the thirteenth century, that French prose ro-
mance begins; and in one of the pretty volumes of the
Bibliothcque Elzevirienne some of the most striking
fragments of it may be found, edited with much intelli-
gence. In one of these thirteenth-century stories, Li
Amities de Ami et Arnile, that free play of human af-
fection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is an
assertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great
friendship, a friendship pure and generous, pushed to a
sort of passionate exaltation, and more than faithful
unto death. Such comradeship, though instances of it
are to be found everywhere, is still especially a classical
motive ; Chaucer expressing the sentiment of it so
strongly in an antique tale, that one knows not whether
the love of both Palamon and Arcite for Emelya, or of
those two for each other, is the chief er subject of the
Knight's Tale

He cast his eyen upon Emelya,

And therewithal he bleynte and cried, ah!

As that he stongcn were unto the herte.

What reader does not refer something of the bitterness
of that cry to the spoiling, already foreseen, of the fair
friendship, which had made the prison of the two lads
sweet hitherto with its daily offices?

The friendship of Amis and Amile is deepened by
I he romantic circumstance of an entire personal resem-
blance between the two heroes, through which they pass

8 THE RENAISSANCE

for each other again and again, and thereby into many
strange adventures ; that curious interest of the Doppel-
ganger, which begins among the stars with the Dioscuri,
being entwined in and out through all the incidents of
the story, like an outward token of the inward similitude
of their souls. With this, again, is connected, like a
second reflection of that inward similitude, the conceit
of two marvelously beautiful cups, also exactly like each
other children's cups, of wood, but adorned with gold
and precious stones. These two cups, which by their
resemblance help to bring the friends together at critical
moments, were given to them by the Pope, when he
baptised them at Rome, whither the parents had taken
them for that purpose, in gratitude for their birth. They
cross and recross very strangely in the narrative, serving
the two heroes almost like living things, and with that
well-known effect of a beautiful object, kept constantly
before the eye in a story or poem, of keeping sensation
Well awake, and giving a certain air of refinement to all
the scenes into which it enters. That sense of fate,
which hangs so much of the shaping of human life on
trivial objects, like Othello's strawberry handkerchief,
is thereby heightened, while witness is borne to the en-
joyment of beautiful handiwork by primitive people,
their simple wonder at it, so that they give it an oddly
significant place among the factors of a human history.
Amis and Amile, then, are true to their comradeship
through all trials; and in the end it comes to pass that
at a moment of great need Amis takes the place of Amile
in a tournament for life or death. "After this it hap-
pened that a leprosy fell upon Amis, so that his wife
would not approach him, and wrought to strangle him.

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 9

He departed therefore from his home, and at last prayed
his servants to carry him to the house of Amile"; and
it is in what follows that the curious strength of the
piece shows itself:

"His servants, willing 1 to do as he commanded, car-
ried him to the place where Amile was ; and they began
to sound their rattles before the court of Amile's house,
as lepers are accustomed to do. And when Amile heard
the noise he commanded one of his servants to carry
meat and bread to the sick man, and the cup which was
given to him at Rome filled with good wine. And when
the servant had done as he was commanded, he returned
and said, Sir, if I had not thy cup in my hand, I should
believe that the cup which the sick man has was thine,
for they are alike, the one to the other, in height and
fashion. And Amile said, Go quickly and bring him to
me. And when Amis stood before his comrade Amile
demanded of him who he was, and how he had gotten
that cup. I am of Briquain le Chastel, answered Amis,
and the cup was given to me by the Bishop of Rome,
who baptised me. And when Amile heard that, he knew
that it was his comrade Amis, who had delivered him
from death, and won for him the daughter of the King
of France to be his wife. And straightway he fell upon
him, and began weeping greatly, and kissed him. And
when his wife heard that, she ran out with her hair in
disarray, weeping and distressed exceedingly, for she
remembered that it was he who had slain the false
Ardres. And thereupon they placed him in a fair bed,
and said to him, Abide with us until God's will be ac-
complished in thee, for all we have is at thy service. So
he and the two servants abode with them.

"And it came to pass one night, when Amis and Amile
lay in one chamber without other companions, that God
sent His angel Raphael to Amis, who said to him, Amis,
art thou asleep? And he, supposing that Amile had

io THE RENAISSANCE

called him, answered and said, I am not asleep, fair
comrade! And the angel said to him, Thou hast an-
swered well, for thou art the comrade of the heavenly
citizens. I am Raphael, the angel of our Lord, and am
come to tell thee how thou mayest be healed; for thy
prayers are heard. Thou shalt bid Amile, thy comrade,
that he slay his two children and wash thee in their
blood, and so thy body shall be made whole. And Amis
said to him, Let not this thing be, that my comrade
should become a murderer for rny sake. But the angel
said, It is convenient that he do this. And thereupon
the angel departed.

"And Amile also, as if in sleep, heard those words;
and he awoke and said, Who is it, my comrade, that
hath spoken with thee? And Amis answered, No man;
only I have prayed to our Lord, as I am accustomed.
And Amile said, Not so ! but some one hath spoken with
thee. Then he arose and went to the door of the cham-
ber; and finding it shut he said, Tell me, my brother,
who it was said those words to thee to-night. And
Amis began to weep greatly, and told 'him that it was
Raphael, the angel of the Lord, who had said to him,
Amis, our Lord commands thee that thou bid Amile
slay his two children, and wash thee in their blood, and
so thou shalt be healed of thy leprosy. And Amile was
greatly disturbed at those words, and said, I would have
given to thee my man-servants and my maid-servants
and all my goods, and thou feignest that an angel hath
spoken to thee that I should slay my two children. And
immediately Amis began to weep, and said, I know that
I have spoken to thee a terrible thing, but constrained
thereto; I pray thee cast me not away from the shelter
of thy house. And Amile answered that what he had
covenanted with him, that he would perform, unto the
hour pf his death : But I conjure thee, said he, by the
faith which there is between me and thee, and by our
comradeship, and by the baptism we received together
at Rome, that thou tell me whether it was man or angel

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES it

said that to thee. And Amis answered again, So truly
as an angel hath spoken to me this night, so may God
deliver me from my infirmity !

"Then Amile began to weep in secret, and thought
within himself: If this man was ready to die before
the king for me, shall I not for him. slay my children?
Shall I not keep faith with him who was faithful to me
even unto death? And Amile tarried no longer, but
departed to the chamber of his wife, and bade her go
hear the Sacred Office. And he took a sword, and went
to the bed where the children were lying, and found
them asleep. And he lay down over them and began to
weep bitterly and said, Hath any man yet heard of a
father who of his own will slew his children? Alas, my
children ! I am no longer your father, but your cruel
murderer.

"And the children awoke at the tears of their father,
which fell upon them ; and they looked up into his face
and began to laugh. And as they were of the age of
about three years, he said, Your laughing will be turned
into tears, for your innocent blood must now be shed,
and therewith he cut off their heads. Then he laid them
back in the bed, and put the heads upon the bodies, and
covered them as though they slept: and with the blood
which he had taken he washed his comrade, and said,
Lord Jesus Christ! who hast commanded men to keep
faith on earth, and didst heal the leper. by Thy word!
cleanse now my comrade, for whose love I have shed
the blood of my children.

"Then Amis was cleansed of his leprosy. And Amile
clothed his companion in his best robes; and as they
went to the church to give thanks, the bells, by the will
of God, rang of their own accord. And when the peo-
ple of the city heard that, they ran together to see the
marvel. And the wife of Amile, when she saw Amis and
Amile coming, asked which of the twain was her hus-
band, and said, I know well the vesture of them both,
but I know not which of them is Amile. And Amile

12 THE RENAISSANCE

said to her, I am Amile, and my companion is Amis,
who is healed of his sickness. And she was full of won-
der, and desired to know in what manner he was healed.
Give thanks to our Lord, answered Amile, but trouble not
thyself as to the manner of the healing.

"Now neither the father nor the mother had yet en-
tered where the children were; but the father sighed
heavily, because they were dead, and the mother asked
for them, that they might rejoice together ; but Amile
said, Dame! let the children sleep. And it was already
the hour of Tierce. And going in alone to the children
to weep over them, he found them at play in the bed;
only, in the place of the sword-cuts about their throats
was as it were a thread of crimson. And he took them
in his arms and carried them to his wife and said, Re-
joice greatly, for thy children whom I had slain by the
commandment of the angel are alive, and by their blood
is Amis healed."

There, as I said, is the strength of the old French
story. For the Renaissance has not only the sweetness
which it derives from the classical world, but also that
curious strength of which there are great resources in
the true middle age. And as I have illustrated the early
strength of the Renaissance by the story of Amis and
Amile, a story which comes from the North, in which
a certain racy Teutonic flavor is perceptible, so I shall
illustrate that other element, its early sweetness, a lan-
guid excess of sweetness even, by another story printed
in the same volume of the Bibliothtque Elzevirienne, and
of about the same date, a story which comes, character-
istically, from the South, and connects itself with the
literature of Provence.

The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the
Tenson and the Aubade^ of Bernard de Ventadour and

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 13

Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few, for the elect and
peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But below
this intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of
literature, less serious and elevated, reaching, by light-
ness of form and comparative homeliness of interest,
an audience which the concentrated passion of those
higher lyrics left untouched. This literature has long
since perished, or lives only in later French or Italian
versions. One such version, the only representative ot
its species, M. Fauriel thought he detected in the story
of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French of the
latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a
unique manuscript, in the national library of Paris ; and
there were reasons which made him divine for it a still
more ancient ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin,
as in a leaf lost out of some early Arabian Nights. 1 The
little book loses none of its interest through the criticism
which finds in it only a traditional subject, handed on by
one people to another ; for after passing thus from hand
to hand, its outline is still clear, its surface untarnished ;
and, like many other stories, books, literary and artistic
conceptions of the middle age, it has come to have in this
way a sort of personal history, almost as full of risk and
adventure as that of its own heroes. The writer himself

1 Recently, Aucassin and Nicolette has been edited and
translated into English, with much graceful scholarship, by
Mr. F. W, Bourdillon. Still more recently we have had a
translation a poet's translation from the ingenious and
versatile pen of Mr. Andrew Lang. The reader should con-
sult also the chapter on "The Out-door Poetry," in Ver-
non Lee's most interesting Euphorion; being Studies of
the Antique and Medi&val in the Renaissance, a work
abounding in knowledge and insight on the subjects of
which it treats.

14 THE RENAISSANCE

calls the piece a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but with
its incidents and sentiment helped forward by songs, in-
serted at irregular intervals. In the junctions of the
story itself there are signs of roughness and want of
skill, which make one suspect that the prose was only
put together to connect a series of songs a series of
songs so moving and attractive that people wished to
heighten and dignify their effect by a regular framework
or setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the simplest
kind, not rhymed even, but only imperfectly assonant,
stanzas of twenty or thirty lines apiece, all ending witri
a similar vowel sound. And here, as elsewhere in that
early poetry, much of the interest lies in the spectacle
of the formation of a new artistic sense. A novel art
is arising, the music of rhymed poetry, and in the songs
of Aucassin and Nicolette, which seem always on the
point of passing into true rhyme, but which halt some-
how, and can never quite take flight, you see people just
growing aware of the elements of a new music in their
possession, and anticipating how pleasant such music
might become.

The piece was probably intended to be recited by a
company of trained performers, many of whom, at least
for the lesser parts, were probably children. The songs
are introduced by the rubric, Or se cante (id on chante) ;
and each division of prose by the rubric, Or dient et con-
tent et fabloient (id on conte). The musical notes of
a portion of the songs have been preserved ; and some of
the details are so descriptive that they suggested to M.
Fauriel the notion that the words had been accompanied
throughout by dramatic action. That mixture of sim-
plicity and refinement which he was surprised to find in

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 15

a composition of the thirteenth century, is shown some-
times in the turn given to some passing expression or
remark; thus, "the Count de Garins was old and frail,
his time was over" Li quens Garins de Beaucaire estoit
vix et frales; si avoit son tans trespass^. And then, all
is so realised! One sees the ancient forest, with its dis-
used roads grown deep with grass, and the place where
seven roads meet u a forkeut set cemin qui s'en vont
par le pais; we hear the light-hearted country people
calling each other by their rustic names, and putting for-
ward, as their spokesman, one among them who is more
eloquent and ready than the rest li ttn qui plus fu en*
Carles des autres; for the little book has its burlesque
element also, so that one hears the faint, far-off laughter
still. Rough as it is, the piece certainly possesses this
high quality of poetry, that it aims at a purely artistic
effect. Its subject is a great sorrow, yet ip claims to be
a thing of joy and refreshment, to be entertained not
for its matter only, but chiefly for its manner, it is
cortois, it tells us, et bien assis.

For the student of manners, and of the old French
language and literature, it has much interest of a purely
antiquarian order. To say of an ancient literary com-
position that it has an antiquarian interest, often means
that it has no distinct aesthetic interest for the reader of
to-day. Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by
putting its object in perspective, and setting the reader
in a certain point of view, from which what gave pleas-
ure to the past is pleasurable for him also, may oftetfj
add greatly to the charm we receive from ancient litera-
ture. But the first condition of such aid must be a real,
direct, aesthetic charm in the thing itself. Unless it has

>r. BRAOD Ace. Not ^ - \

16 THE RENAISSANCE

that charm, unless some purely artistic quality went to
its original making, no merely antiquarian effort can
ever give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper sub-
ject of aesthetic criticism. This quality, wherever it ex-
ists, it is always pleasant to define, and discriminate
from the sort of borrowed interest which an old play,
or an old story, may very likely acquire through a true
antiquarianism. The story of Aucassin and Nicolette
has something of this quality. Aucassin, the only son of
Court Garins of Beaucaire, is passionately in love with
Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknown parentage, bought
of the Saracens, whom his father will not permit him to
marry. The story turns on the adventures of these two
lovers, until at the end of the piece their mutual fidelity
is rewarded. These adventures are of the simplest sort,
adventures which seem to be chosen for the happy oc-
casion they afford of keeping the eye of the fancy, per-
haps the outward eye, fixed on pleasant objects, a gar-
den, a ruined tower, the little hut of flowers which Nico-
lette constructs in the forest whither she escapes from
her enemies, as a token to Aucassin that she has passed
that way. All the charm of the piece is in its details, in
a turn of peculiar lightness and grace given to the situa-
tions and traits of sentiment, especially in its quaint
fragments of early French prose.

All through it one feels the influence of that faint air
of overwrought delicacy, almost of wantonness, which
fcras so strong a characteristic of the poetry of the Trou-
badours. The Troubadours themselves were often men
of great rank ; they wrote for an exclusive audience,
people of much leisure and great refinement, and they
came to value a type of personal beauty which has in it

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 17

but little of the influence of the open air and sunshine.
There is a languid Eastern deliciousness in the very
scenery of the story, the full-blown roses, the chamber
painted in some mysterious manner where Nicolette is
imprisoned, the cool brown marble, the almost nameless
colors, the odors of plucked grass and flowers. Nico-
lette herself well becomes this scenery, and is the best
illustration of the quality I mean the beautiful, weird,
foreign girl, whom the shepherds take for a fay, who has
the knowledge of simples, the healing and beautifying
qualities of leaves and flowers, whose skilful touch heals
Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that he suddenly leaps
from the ground; the mere sight of whose white flesh,
as she passed the place where he lay, healed a pilgrim
stricken with sore disease, so that he rose up, and re-
turned to his own country. With this girl Aucassin is
so deeply in love that he forgets all knightly duties. At
last Nicolette is shut up to get her out of his way, and
perhaps the prettiest passage in the whole piece is the
fragment of prose which describes her escape :

"Aucassin was put in prison, as you have heard, and
Nicolette remained shut up in her chamber. It was
summer-time, in the month of May, when the days are
warm and long and clear, and the nights coy and serene.

"One night Nicolette, lying on her bed, saw the moon
shine clear through the little window, and heard the
nightingale sing in the garden, and then came the mem-
ory of Aucassin, whom she so much loved. She thought
of the Count Garins of Beaucaire, who mortally hated
her, and, to be rid of her, might at any moment cause
her to be burned or drowned. She perceived that the
old woman who kept her company was asleep ; she rose
and put on the fairest gown she had ; she took the bed-

18 THE RENAISSANCE

clothes and the towels, and knotted them together H
a cord, as far as they would go. Then she tied the end
to a pillar of the window, and let herself slip down quite
softly into the garden, and passed straight across it, to
reach the town.

"Her hair was yellow in small curls, her smiling eyes
blue-green, her face clear and feat, the little lips very
red, the teeth small and white ; and the daisies which she
crushed in passing, holding her skirt high behind and
before, looked dark against her feet; the girl was so
white !

"She came to the garden-gate and opened it, and
walked through the streets of Beaucaire, keeping on the
dark side of the way to be out of the light of the moon,
which shone quietly in the sky. She walked as fast as
she could, until she came to the tower where Aucassin
was. The tower was set about with pillars, here and
there. She pressed herself against one of the pillars,
wrapped herself closely in her mantle, and putting her
face to a chink of the tower, which was old and ruined,
she heard Aucassin crying bitterly within, and when
she had listened awhile she began to speak."

But scattered up and down through this lighter matter,
always tinged with humor and often passing into bur-
lesque, which makes up the general substance of the
piece, there are morsels of a different quality, touches
of some intenser sentiment, coming it would seem from
the profound and energetic spirit of the Provengal
poetry itself, to which the inspiration of the book has
been referred. Let me gather up these morsels of
deeper color, these expressions of the ideal intensity of
love, the motive which really unites together the frag-
ments of the little composition. Dante, the perfect
flower of ideal love, has recorded how the tyranny of
that "Lord of terrible aspect" became actually physical,

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES ig

blinding his senses, and suspending his bodily forces. In
this, Dante is but the central expression and type of ex-
periences known well enough to the initiated, in thai
passionate age. Aucassin represents this ideal intensity
of passion

Aucassin, li biax, li blons,
Li gentix, li amorous;

the slim, tall, debonair, dansellon, as the singers call
him, with his curled yellow hair, and eyes of vair, who
faints with love, as Dante fainted, who rides all day
through the forest in search of Nicolette, while the
thorns tear his flesh, so that one might have traced him
by the blood upon the grass, and who weeps at eventide
because he has not found her, who has the malady of
his love, and neglects all knightly duties. Once he is
induced to put himself at the head of his people, that
they, seeing him before them, might have more heart
to defend themselves ; then a song relates how the sweet,
grave figure goes forth to battle, in dainty, tight-laced
armor. It is the very image of the Provencal Icrve-god,
no longer a child, but grown to pensive youth, as Pierre
Vidal met him, riding on a white horse, fair as the
morning, his vestment embroidered with flowers. He
rode on through the gates into the open plain beyond.
But as he went, that great malady of his love came upon
him. The bridle fell from his hands ; and like one who
sleeps walking, he was carried on into the midst of his
enemies, and heard them talking together how they
might most conveniently kill him.

One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak
of the reason and the imagination, of that assertion of

M THE RENAISSANCE

the liberty of the heart, in the middle age, which I have
termed a medieval Renaissance, was its antinomianism,
its spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral and
religious ideas of the time. In their search after the
pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their
care for beauty, in their worship of the body, people
were impelled beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal ;
and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a
strange rival religion. It was the return of that ancient
Venus, not dead, but only hidden for a time in the
caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagan gods still
going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of dis-
guises. And this element in the middle age, for the
most part ignored by those writers who have treated
it pre-eminently as the "Age of Faith" this rebellious
and antinomian element, the recognition of which has
made the delineation of the middle age by the writers of
the Romantic school in France, by Victor Hugo for in-
stance in Notre-Dame de Paris, so suggestive and ex-
citing is found alike in the history of Abelard and the
legend of Tannhauser. More and more, as we come to
mark changes and distinctions of temper in what is often
in one all-embracing confusion called the middle age,
that rebellion, that sinister claim for liberty of heart and
thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian move-
ment, connected so strangely with the history of Pro-
vengal poetry, is deeply tinged with it. A touch of it
makes the Franciscan order, with its poetry, its mysti-
cism, its "illumination/* from the point of view of re-
ligious authority, justly suspect. It influences the
thoughts of those obscure prophetical writers, like Joa-
^chim of Flora, strange dreamers in a world of flowery

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 21

rhetoric of that third and final dispensation of a "spirif
of freedom," in which law shall have passed away. Of
this spirit Aucassin and Nicolette contains perhaps the
most famous expression : it is the answer Aucassin gives
when he is threatened with the pains of hell, if he makes
Nicolette his mistress. A creature wholly of affection
and the senses, he sees on the way to paradise only a
feeble and worn-out company of aged priests, "clinging
day and night to the chapel altars," barefoot or in
patched sandals. With or even without Nicolette, "his
sweet mistress whom he so much loves," he, for his part,
is ready to start on the way to hell, along with "the good
scholars," as he says, and the actors, and the fine horse-
men dead in battle, and the men of fashion, 1 and "the
fair courteous ladies who had two or three chevaliers
apiece beside their own true lords," all gay with music,
in their gold, and silver, and beautiful furs "the vair
and the grey."

But in the House Beautiful the saints, too, have their
place; and the student of the Renaissance has this ad-
vantage over the student of the emancipation of the
human mind in the Reformation, or the French Revolu-
tion, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher
levels, he is not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities
and antagonisms of some well- recognised controversy,
with rigidly defined opposites, exhausting the intelli-
gence and limiting one's sympathies. The opposition
of the professional defenders of a mere system to that

1 Par age, peerage: which came to signify all that am-
bitious youth affected most on the outside of life, in that
old world of the Troubadours, with whom this term is of
frequent recurrence.

2 THE RENAISSANCE

more sincere and generous play of the forces of human
mind and character, which I have noted as the secret
of Abelard's struggle, is, indeed, always powerful. But
the incompatibility with one another of souls really
"fair" is not essential; and within the enchanted region
of the Renaissance one needs not be for ever on one's
guard. Here there are no fixed parties, no exclusions:
all breathes of that unity of culture in which "whatso-
ever things are comely" are reconciled, for the elevation
and adorning of our spirits. And just in proportion as
those who took part in the Renaissance become cen-
trally representative of it, just so much the more is this
condition realised in them. The wicked popes, and the
loveless tyrants, who from time to time became it?
patrons, or mere speculators in its fortunes, lend them-
selves easily to disputations, and, from this side or that,
the spirit of controversy lays just hold upon them. But
the painter of the Last Supper, with his kindred,, lives
in a land where controversy has no breathing-place.
They refuse to be classified. In the story of Aucassin
and Nicolette, in the literature which it represents, the
note of defiance, of the opposition of one system to an-
other, is sometimes harsh. Let me conclude then with
a morsel from Amis and Amile, in which the harmony
of human interests is still entire. For the story of the
great traditional friendship, in which, as I said, the lib-
erty of the heart makes itself felt, seems, as we have it,
to have been written by a monk La vie des saints mar-
tyrs Amis et Amile. It was not till the end of the seven-
teenth century that their names were finally excluded
from the martyrology; and their story ends with this

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 23

monkish miracle of earthly comradeship, more than
faithful unto death:

"For, as God had united them in their lives in one ac-
cord, so they were not divided in their death, falling
together side by side, with a host of other brave men,
in battle for King Charles at Mortara, so called from
that great slaughter. And the bishops gave counsel to
the king and queen that they should bury the dead, and
build a church in that place ; and their counsel pleased
the king greatly. And there were built two churches,
the one by commandment of the king in honor of Saint
Oseige, and the other by commandment of the queen in
honor of Saint Peter.

"And the king caused the two chests of stone to be
brought in the which the bodies of Amis and Amile lay ;
and Amile was carried to the church of Saint Peter, and
Amis to the church of Saint Oseige; and the other
corpses were buried, some in one place and some in the
other. But lo! next morning, the body of Amile in his
coffin was found lying in the church of Saint Oseige,
beside the coffin of Amis his comrade. Behold then this
wondrous amity, which by death could not be dissevered I

"This miracle God did, who gave to His disciples
power to remove mountains. And by reason of this
miracle the king and queen remained in that place for a
space of thirty days, and performed the offices of the
dead who were slain, and honored the said churches
with great gifts. And the bishop ordained many clerks
to serve in the church of Saint Oseige, and commanded
them that they should guard duly, with great devotion,
the bodies of the two companions, Amis and Amile."

1872.

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

No account of the Renaissance can be complete with-
out some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian
scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity
with the religion of ancient Greece. To reconcile forms
of sentiment which at first sight seem incompatible, to
adjust the various products of the human mind to one
another in one many-sided type of intellectual culture,
to give humanity, for heart and imagination to feed
upon, as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to
ffce generous instincts of that age. An earlier and sim-
pler generation had seen in the gods of Greece so many
malignant spirits, the defeated but still living centers of
the religion of darkness, struggling, not always in vain,
against the kingdom of light. Little by little, as the
natural charm of pagan story reasserted itself over minds
emerging out of barbarism, the religious significance
which had once belonged to it was lost sight of, and it
came to be regarded as the subject of a purely artistic
or poetical treatment. But it was inevitable that from
time to time minds should arise, deeply enough im-
pressed by its beauty and power to ask themselves
whether the religion of Greece was indeed a rival of the
religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated
themselves, and men's allegiance was divided. And the
fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and
serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated every-

24

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 23

thing with which art had to do as a religious object.
The restored Greek literature had made it familiar, at
least in Plato, with a style of expression concerning the
earlier gods, which had about it something of the warmth
and unction of a Christian hymn. It was too familiar
with such language to regard mythology as a mere story ;
and it was too serious to play with a religion.

"Let me briefly remind the reader" says Heine, in
the "Gods in Exile/' an essay full of that strange blend*
ing of sentiment which is characteristic of the traditions
of the middle age concerning the pagan religions "how
the gods of the older world, at the time of the definite
triumph of Christianity, that is, in the third century,
fell into painful embarrassments, which greatly resem-
bled certain tragical situations of their earlier life. They
now found themselves beset by the same troublesome
necessities to which they had once before been exposed
during the primitive ages, in that revolutionary epoch
when the Titans broke out of the custody of Orcus, and,
piling Pelion on Ossa, scaled Olympus. Unfortunate
gods ! They had then to take flight ignominiously, and
hide themselves among us here on earth, under all sorts
of disguises. The larger number betook themselves to
Egypt, where for greater security they assumed the
forms of animals, as is generally known. Just in the
same way, they had to take flight again, and seek enter-
tainment in remote hiding-places, when those iconoclas->
tic zealots, the black brood of monks, broke down all
the temples, and pursued the gods with fire and curses.
Many of these unfortunate emigrants, now entirely de-
prived of shelter and ambrosia, must needs take to vul-
IRI handicrafts, as a means of earning their bread. Un-

26 THE RENAISSANCE

der these circumstances, many whose sacred groves had
been confiscated, let themselves out for hire as wood-
cutters in Germany, and were forced to drink beer in-
stead of nectar. Apollo seems to have been content to
take service under graziers, and as he had once kept the
cows of Admetus, so he lived now as a shepherd in
Lower Austria. Here, however, having become sus-
pected on account of his beautiful singing, he was recog-
nised by a learned monk as one of the old pagan gods,
and handed over to the spiritual tribunal. On the rack
he confessed that he was the god Apollo ; and before his
execution he begged that he might be suffered to play
once more upon the lyre, and to sing a song. And he
played so touchingly, and sang with such magic, and was
withal so beautiful in form and feature, that all the
women wept, and many of them were so deeply im-
pressed that they shortly afterwards fell sick. Some
time afterwards the people wished to drag him from
the grave again, that a stake might be driven through
his body, in the belief that he had been a vampire, and
that the sick women would by this means recover. But
they found the grave empty."

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many
things, great rather by what it designed than by what it
achieved. Much which it aspired to do, and did but
imperfectly or mistakenly, was accomplished in what is
called the eclaircissement of the eighteenth century, or
in our own generation ; and what really belongs to the
revival of the fifteenth century is but the leading in-
stinct, the curiosity, the initiatory idea. It is so with
this very question of the reconciliation of the religion of
antiquity with the religion of Christ. A modern scholar

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 27

occupied by this problem might observe that all religions
may be regarded as natural products, that, at least in
their origin, their growth, and decay, they have common
laws, and are not to be isolated from the other move-
ments of the human mind in the periods in which they
respectively prevailed ; that they arise spontaneously out
of the human mind, as expressions of the varying phases
of its sentiment concerning the unseen world ; that every
intellectual product must be judged from the point of
view of the age and the people in which it was produced.
He might go on to observe that each has contributed
something to the development of the religious sense, and
ranging them as so many stages in the gradual educa-
tion of the human mind, justify the existence of each.
The basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the
World would thus be the inexhaustible activity and crea-
tiveness of the human mind itself, in which all religions
alike have their root, and In which all alike are recon-
ciled ; just as the fancies of childhood and the thoughts
of old age meet and are laid to rest, in the experience of
the individual.

Far different was the method followed by the scholars
of the fifteenth century. They lacked the very rudi-
ments of the historic sense, which, by an imaginative
act, throws itself back into a world unlike one's own,
and estimates every intellectual creation in its connection
with the age from which it proceeded. They had no
idea of development, of the differences of ages, of the
process by which our race has been "educated/' In their
attempts to reconcile the religions of the world, they
were thus thrown back upon the quicksand of allegorical
interpretation. The religions of the world were to be

28 THE RENAISSANCE

reconciled, not as successive stages in a regular develop-
ment of the religious sense, but as subsisting side by
side, and substantially in agreement with one another.
And here the first necessity was to misrepresent the lan-
guage, the conceptions, the sentiments, it was proposed
to compare and reconcile. Plato and Homer must be
made to speak agreeably to Moses. Set side by side,
the mere surfaces could never unite in any harmony of
design. Therefore one must go below the surface, and
bring up the supposed secondary, or still more remote
meaning, that diviner signification held in reserve, in
recessu divinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of
Homer, or figure of speech in the book of Moses.

And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "mad-
house-cell," if you will, into which we may peep for a
moment, and see it at work weaving strange fancies,
the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century
has its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its
quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations and subtle
moralising, it is an element in the local color of a great
age. It illustrates also the faith of that age in all oracles,
its desire to hear all voices, its generous belief that noth-
ing which had ever interested the human mind could
wholly lose its vitality. It is the counterpart, though
certainly the feebler counterpart, of that practical truce
and reconciliation of the gods of Greece with the Chris-
tian religion, which is seen in the art of the time. And
it is for his share in this work, and because his own story
is a sort of analogue or visible equivalent to the expres-
sion of this purpose in his writings, that something of a
general interest still belongs to the name of Pico della
Mirandola, whose life, written by his nephew Francis,

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 29

seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to be
translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More,
that great lover of Italian culture, among whose works
the life of Pico, Earl of Mirandola, and a great lord of
Italy, as he calls him, may still be read, in its quaint,
antiquated English.

Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came to Florence.
It was the very day some day probably in the year 1482
on which Ficino had finished his famous translation
of Plato into Latin, the work to which he had been dedi-
cated from childhood by Cosmo de' Medici, in further-
ance of his desire to resuscitate the knowledge of Plato
among his fellow-citizens. Florence indeed, as M.
Renan has pointed out, had always had an affinity for
the mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the
colder and more practical philosophy of Aristotle had
flourished in Padua, and other cities of the north; and
the Florentines, though they knew perhaps very littifl
about him, had had the name of the great idealist often
on their lips. To increase this knowledge, Cosmo had
founded the Platonic academy, with periodical discus-
sions at the Villa Careggi. The fall of Constantinople
in 1453, an d the council in 1438 for the reconciliation of
the Greek and Latin Churches, had brought to Florence
many a needy Greek scholar. And now the work was
completed, the door of the mystical tenjple lay open to
all who could construe Latin, and the scholar rested from
his labor; when there was introduced into his study,
where a lamp burned continually before the bust of
Plato, as other men burned lamps before their favorite
saints, a young man fresh from a journey, "of feature
and shapg seemly and beauteous, of stature goodly and

30 THE RENAISSANCE

high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage lovely and fair,
his color white, intermingled with comely reds, his eyes
grey, and quick of look, his teeth white and even, his
hair yellow and abundant/' and trimmed with more than
the usual artifice of the time.

It is thus that Sir Thomas More translates the words
of the biographer of Pico, who, even in outward form
and appearance, seems an image of that inward har-
mony and completeness, of which he is so perfect an
example. The word mystic has been usually derived
from a Greek word which signifies to shut, as if one shut
one's lips brooding on what cannot be uttered; but the
Platonists themselves derive it rather from the act of
shutting the eyes, that one may see the more, inwardly.
Perhaps the eyes of the mystic Ficino, now long past
the midway of life, had come to be thus half-closed;
tut when a young man, not unlike the archangel Raphael,
as the Florentines of that age depicted him in his won-
derful walk with Tobit, or Mercury, as he might have
appeared in a painting by Sandro Botticelli or Piero di
Cosimo, entered his chamber, he seems to have thought
there was something not wholly earthly about him; at
least, he ever afterwards believed that it was not with-
out the cooperation of the stars that the stranger had
arrived on that day. For it happened that they fell into
a conversation, deeper and more intimate than men
usually fall into at first sight. During this conversation
Ficino formed the design of devoting his remaining
years to the translation of Plotinus, that new Plato, in
whom the mystical element in the Platonic philosophy
had been worked out to the utmost limit of vision and
ecstasy; and it is in dedicating this translation to Lo

PICO BELLA MIRANDOLA 31

renzo de' Medici that Ficino has recorded these inci-
dents.

It was after many wanderings, wanderings of the in-
tellect as well as physical journeys, that Pico came to
rest at Florence. Born in 1463, he was then about
twenty years old. He was called Giovanni at baptism,
Pico, like all his ancestors, from Picus, nephew of the
Emperor Constantine, from whom they claimed to be
descended, and Mirandola from the place of his birth,
A little town afterwards part of the duchy of Modena,
of which small territory his family had long been the
feudal lords. Pico was the youngest of the family, and
his mother, delighting in his wonderful memory, sent
him at the age of fourteen to the famous school of law
at Bologna. From the first, indeed, she seems to have
had some presentiment of his future fame, for, with a
faith in omens characteristic of her time, she believed
that a strange circumstance had happened at the time of
Pico's birth the appearance of a circular flame which
suddenly vanished away, on the wall of the chamber
where she lay. He remained two years at Bologna ; and
then, with an inexhaustible, unrivalled thirst for knowl-
edge, the strange, confused, uncritical learning of that
age, passed through the principal schools of Italy and
France, penetrating, as he thought, into the secrets of
all ancient philosophies, and many Eastern languages.
And with this flood of erudition came the generous hope,
so often disabused, of reconciling the philosophers with
one another, and all alike with the Church. At last he
came to Rome. There, like some knight-errant of phi-
losophy, he offered to defend nine hundred bold para-
doxes, drawn from the most opposite sources, against

32 THE RENAISSANCE

all comers. But the pontifical court was led to suspect
the orthodoxy of some of these propositions, and even
the reading of the book which contained them was for-
bidden by the Pope. It was not until 1493 that Pico
was finally absolved, by a brief of Alexander the Sixth.
Ten years before that date he had arrived at Florence;
an early instance of those who, after following the vain
hope of an impossible reconciliation from system to sys-
tem, have at last fallen back unsatisfied on the simplici-
ties of their childhood's belief.

The oration which Pico composed for the opening of
this philosophical tournament still remains; its subject is
the dignity of human nature, the greatness of man. In
common with nearly all medieval speculation, much of
Pico's writing has this for its drift; and in common
also with it, Pico's theory of that dignity is founded on
a misconception of the place in nature both of the earth
and of man. For Pico the earth is the center of the
universe : and around it, as a fixed and motionless point,
the sun and moon and stars revolve, like diligent serv-
ants or ministers. And in the midst of all is placed
man, nodus et vinculum mundi, the bond or copula of
the world, and the "interpreter of nature" : that famous
expression of Bacon's really belongs to Pico. Tritum
est in scholis, he says, esse hominem minorem mundum,
in quo mixtum ex elementis corpus et spiritus coelestis
et plantarum anima vegetalis et brutorum sensus et ratio
et angelica mens et Dei similitudo conspicitur "It is a
commonplace of the schools that man is a little world,
in which we may discern a body mingled of earthly ele-
ments, and ethereal breath, and the vegetable life of
plants, and the senses of the lower animals, and reason,

PICO BELLA MIRANDOLA 33

5nd the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God."
A commonplace of the schools! But perhaps it had
some new significance and authority, when men heard
ane like Pico reiterate it ; and, false as its basis was, the
theory had its use. For this high dignity of man, thus
Bringing the dust under his feet into sensible communion
with the thoughts and affections of the angels, was sup-
posed to belong to him, not as renewed by a religious
system, but by his own natural right. The proclamation
of it was a counterpoise to the increasing tendency of
medieval religion to depreciate man's nature, to sacrifice
this or that element in it, to make it ashamed of itself,
to keep the degrading or painful accidents of it always
in view. It helped man onward to that reassertion of
himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body,
the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Renais-
sance fulfils. And yet to read a page of one of Pico's
forgotten books is like a glance into one of those ancient
sepulchres, upon which the wanderer in classical lands
has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornaments
and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh
in them. That whole conception of nature is so different
from our own. For Pico the world is a limited place,
bounded by actual crystal walls, and a material firma-
ment; it is like a painted toy, like that map or system of
the world, held, as a great target or shield, in the hands
of the creative Logos, by whom the Father made all
things, in one of the earlier frescoes of the Campo Santo
at Pisa. How different from this childish dream is our
own conception of nature, with its unlimited space, its
innumerable suns, and the earth but a mote in the beam;
how different the strange new awe, or superstition, witfr

34 THE RENAISSANCE

which it fills our minds ! "The silence of those infinite
spaces/' says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night, "the
silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me" : Le silence
kernel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.

He was already almost wearied out when he came to
Florence. He had loved much and been beloved by
women, "wandering over the crooked hills of delicious
pleasure"; but their reign over him was over, and long
before Savonarola's famous "bonfire of vanities/' he
had destroyed those love-songs in the vulgar tongue,
which would have been so great a relief to us, after the
scholastic prolixity of his Latin writings. It was in an-
other spirit that he composed a Platonic commentary,
the only work of his in Italian which has come down to
us, on the "Song of Divine Love" secondo la mente ed
opinione dei Platonici "according to the mind and
opinion of the Platonists," by his friend Hieronymo
Beniveni, in which, with an ambitious array of every
sort of learning, and a profusion of imagery borrowed
indifferently from the astrologers, the Cabala, and
Homer, and Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagite,
he attempts to define the stages by which the soul passes
from the earthly to the unseen beauty. A change, in-
deed, had passed over him, as if the chilling touch of the
abstract and disembodied beauty Platonists profess to
long for were already upon him. Some sense of this,
perhaps, coupled with that over-brightness which in the
popular imagination always betokens an early death,
made Camilla Rucellai, one of those prophetic women
whom the preaching of Savonarola had raised up in
Florence, declare, seeing him for the first time, that he
would depart in the time of lilies prematurely, that is,

PICO BELLA MIRANDOLA 35

like the field-flowers which are withered by the scorch-
ing sun almost as soon as they are sprung up. He now
wrote down those thoughts on the religious life which
Sir Thomas More turned into English, and which an-
other English translator thought worthy to be added to
the books of the Imitation. "It is not hard to know
God, provided one will not force one's self to define
Him": has been thought a great saying of Joubert's.
"Love God," Pico writes to Angelo Politian, "we rather
may, than either know Him, or by speech utter Him.
And yet had men liefer by knowledge never find that
which they seek, than by love possess that thing, which
also without love were in vain found."

Yet he who had this fine touch for spiritual things did
not and in this is the enduring interest of his story
even after his conversion, forget the old gods. He is
one of the last who seriously and sincerely entertained
the claim on men's faith of the pagan religions; he is
anxious to ascertain the true significance of the obscurest
legend, the lightest tradition concerning them. WitH
many thoughts and many influences which led him in
that direction, he did not become a monk; only he be-
came gentle and patient in disputation ; retaining "some-
what of the old plenty, in dainty viand and silver vessel,"
he gave over the greater part of his property to his
friend, the mystical poet Beniveni, to be spent by him
in works of charity, chiefly in the sweet charity of pro-
viding marriage-dowries for the peasant girls of Flor-
ence. His end came in 1494, when, amid the prayers and
sacraments of Savonarola, he died of fever, on the very
day on which Charles the Eighth entered Florence, the
seventeenth of November, yet in the time of lilies the

36 THE RENAISSANCE

lilies of the shield of France, as the people now said,
remembering Camilla's prophecy. He was buried in the
conventual church of Saint Mark, in the hood and white
frock of the Dominican order.

It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest
in the Dominican habit, yet amid thoughts of the older
gods, himself like one of those comely divinities, recon-
ciled indeed to the new religion, but still with a tender-
ness for the earlier life, and desirous literally to "bind
the ages each to each by natural piety " it is because
this life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made in
his writings to reconcile Christianity with the ideas of
paganism, that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character
of those writings, is really interesting. Thus, in the
Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of the
Creation, he endeavors to reconcile the accounts which
pagan philosophy had given of the origin of the world
with the account given in the books of Moses the
Timceus of Plato with the book of Genesis. The Heptfr-
plus is dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose in-
terest, the preface tells us, in the secret wisdom of Moses
is well known. If Moses seems in his writings simple'
and even popular, rather than either a philosopher or a
theologian, that is because it was an institution with the
ancient philosophers, either not to speak of divine things
at all, or to speak of them dissemblingly : hence their
doctrines were called mysteries. Taught by them, Pytha-
goras became so great a "master of silence," and wrote
almost nothing, thus hiding the words of God in his
heart, and speaking wisdom only among the perfect. In
explaining the harmony between Plato and Moses, Pico
lays hold on every sort of figure and analogy, on the

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 37

double meanings of words, the symbols of the Jewish
ritual, the secondary meanings of obscure stories in the
later Greek mythologists. Everywhere there is an un-
broken system of correspondences. Every object in the
terrestrial world is an analogue, a symbol or counter-
part, of some higher reality in the starry heavens, and
this again of some law of the angelic life in the world
beyond the stars. There is the element of fire in the
material world ; the sun is the fire of heaven ; and in the
super-celestial world there is the fire of the seraphic in-
telligence. "But behold how they differ! The elemen-
tary fire burns, the heavenly fire vivifies, the super-celes-
tial fire loves." In this way, every natural object, every
combination of natural forces, every accident in the lives
of men, is filled with higher meanings. Omens, prophe-
cies, supernatural coincidences, accompany Pico himself
all through life. There are oracles in every tree and
mountain-top, and a significance in every accidental com-
bination of the events of life.

This constant tendency to symbolism and imagery
gives Pico's work a figured style, by which it has some
real resemblance to Plato's, and he differs from other
mystical writers of his time by a genuine desire to know
his authorities at first hand. He reads Plato in Greek,
Moses in Hebrew, and by this his work really belongs
to the higher culture. Above all, we have a constant
sense in reading him, that his thoughts, however little
their positive value may be, are connected with the strings
beneath them of deep and passionate emotion ; and when
he explains the grades or steps by which the soul passes
from the love of a physical object to the love of unseen
beauty,' and unfolds the analogies between this process

38 THE RENAISSANCE

and other movements upward of human thought, there
is a glow and vehemence in his words which remind one
of the manner in which his own brief existence flamed
itself away.

I said that the Renaissance of the fifteenth century
was, in many things, great rather by what it designed or
aspired to do, than by what it actually achieved. It re-
mained for a later age to conceive the true method of
effecting a scientific reconciliation of Christian sentiment
with the imagery, the legends, the theories about the
world, of pagan poetry and philosophy. For that age
the only possible reconciliation was an imaginative one,
and resulted from the efforts of artists, trained in Chris-
tian schools, to handle pagan subjects; and of this artist-
ic reconciliation work like Pico's was but the feebler
counterpart. Whatever philosophers had to say on one
side or the other, whether they were successful or not
in their attempts to reconcile the old to the new, and to
justify the expenditure of so much care and thought on
the dreams of a dead faith, the imagery of the Greek
religion, the direct charm of its story, were by artists
valued and cultivated for their own sake. Hence a new
sort of mythology, with a tone and qualities of its own.
When the ship-load of sacred earth from the soil of
Jerusalem was mingled with the common clay in the
Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flower grew up from it, un-
like any flower men had seen before, the anemone with
its concentric rings of strangely blended color, still to be
found by those who search long enough for it, in the
long grass of the Maremma. Just such a strange flower
was that mythology of the Italian Renaissance, which
grew up from the mixture of two traditions, two senti-

PICO BELLA MIRANDOLA 39

ments, the sacred and the profane. Classical story was
regarded as so much imaginative material to be received
and assimilated. It did not come into men's minds to
ask curiously of science, concerning the origin of such
story, its primary form and import, its meaning for those
who projected it. The thing sank into their minds, to
issue forth again with al^ the tangle about it qf medieval
sentiment and ideas. In the Doni Madonna in the
Tribune of the Uffizii, Michelangelo actually brings the
pagan religion, and with it the unveiled human form,
the sleepy-looking fauns of a Dionysiac revel, into the
presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters had intro-
duced there other products of the earth, birds or flowers,
while he has given to that Madonna herself much of the
uncouth energy of the older and more primitive "Mighty
Mother."

This picturesque union of contrasts, belonging prop-
erly to the art of the close of the fifteenth century, per-
vades, in Pico della Mirandola, an actual person and
that is why the figure of Pico is so attractive. He will
not let one go ; he wins one on, in spite of one's self, to
turn again to the pages of his forgotten books, although
we know already that the actual solution proposed in
them will satisfy us as little as perhaps it satisfied him.
It is said that in his eagerness for mysterious learning
he once paid a great sum for a collection of cabalistic
manuscripts, which turned out to be forgeries; and the
story might well stand as a parable of all he ever seemed
to gain in the way of actual knowledge. He had sought
knowledge, and passed from system to system, and
hazarded much ; but less for the sake of positive knowl-
edge than- because he believed there was a spirit of order

40 THE RENAISSANCE

and beauty in knowledge, which would come down and
unite what men's ignorance had divided, and renew what
time had made dim. And so, while his actual work has
passed away, yet his own qualities are still active, and
himself remains, as one alive in the grave, caesiis et
vigilibus oculis, as his biographer describes him, and
with that sanguine, clear skin, decenti rubore interspersa,
as with the light of morning upon it ; and he has a true
place in that group of great Italians who fill the end of
the fifteenth century with their names, he is a true
humanist. For the essence of humanism is that belief
of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing
which has ever interested living men and women can
wholly lose its vitality no language they have spoken,
nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices,
no dream which has once been entertained by actual
human minds, nothing about which they have ever been
passionate, or expended time and zeal.

1871.

SANDRO BOTTICELLI

IN Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contem-
porary is mentioned by name Sandro Botticelli. This
preeminence may be due to chance only, but to some will
rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; for peo-
ple have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work,
and his name, little known in the last century, is quietly
becoming important. In the middle of the fifteenth cen-
tury he had already anticipated much of that meditative?
subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the
great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the
simple religion which had occupied the followers of
Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which
had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only,
he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the
modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and
in new readings of his own of classical stories : or, if he
painted religious incidents, painted them with an under-
current of original sentiment, which touches you as the
real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensi-
ble subject. What is the peculiar sensation, what is the*
peculiar quality ojf pleasure, which his work has the
property of exciting in us, and which we cannot get
elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to speak
of a comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief
question- which a critic has to answer.

In an age when the lives of artists were full of adyen-

4*

42 THE RENAISSANCE

ture, his life is almost colorless. Criticism, indeed, has
cleared away much of the gossip which Vasari accumu-
lated, has touched the legend of Lippo and Lucrezia,
and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del Castagno.
But in Botticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate.
He did not even go by his true name : Sandro is a nick-
name, and his true name is Filipepi, Botticelli being only
the name of the goldsmith who first taught him art.
Only two things happened to him, two things which he
shared with other artists: he was invited to Rome to
paint in the Sistine Chapel, and he fell in later life under
the influence of Savonarola, passing apparently almost
out of men's sight in a sort of religious melancholy,
which lasted till his death in 1515, according to the re-
ceived date. Vasari says that he plunged into the study
of Dante, and even wrote a comment on the Divine
Comedy. But it seems strange that he should have lived
on inactive so long; and one almost wishes that some
document might come to light, which, fixing the date of
his death earlier, might relieve one, in thinking of him,
of his dejected old age.

He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the
charm of story and sentiment, the medium of the art of
poetry, with the charm of line and color, the medium
of abstract painting. So he becomes the illustrator of
Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481,
the blank spaces, left at the beginning of every canto
for the hand of the illuminator, have been filled, as far
as the nineteenth canto of the Inferno, with impres-
sions of engraved plates, seemingly by way of experi-
ment, for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the
three impressions it contains has been printed upside

- SANDRO BOTTICELLI 43

down, and much awry, in the midst of the luxurious
printed page. Giotto, and the followers of Giotto, with
their almost childish religious aim, had not learned to
put that weight of meaning into outward things, light,
color, everyday gesture, which the poetry of the Divine
Comedy involves, and before the fifteenth century Dante
could hardly have found an illustrator. Botticelli's illus-
trations are crowded with incident, blending, with a
naive carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases of
the same scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often
a stumbling-block to painters, who forget that the words
of a po^t, which only feebly present an image to the
mind, must be lowered in key when translated into visible
form, make one regret that he has not rather chosen for
illustration the more subdued imagery of the Purgatorio.
Yet in the scene of those who "go down quick into hell/'
there is an inventive force about the fire taking hold on
the upturned soles of the feet, which proves that the
design is no mere translation of Dante's words, but a
true painter's vision; while the scene of the Centaurs
wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actual circum-
stances of their appearance, Botticelli has gone off with
delight on the thought of the Centaurs themselves, bright,
small creatures of the woodland, with arch baby faces
and mignon forms, drawing tiny bows.

Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he
might have been a mere naturalist among them. There
are traces enough in his work of that alert sense of out-
ward things, which, in the pictures of that period, fills
the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the hillsides
with pools of water, and the pools of water with flower-
ing reeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a

44 THE RENAISSANCE

visionary painter, and in his visionariness he resembles
Dante. Giotto, the tried companion of Dante, Masaccio,
Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or less
refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not
visionary painters; they are almost impassive spectators
of the action before them. But the genius of which
Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as the
exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this
interest it plays fast and loose with those data, rejecting
some and isolating others, and always combining them
anew. To him, as to Dante, the scene, the color, the out-
ward image or gesture, comes with all its incisive and
importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by
some subtle law of his own structure, a mood which it
awakes in no one else, of which it is the double or repeti-
tion, and which it clothes, that all may share it, with
visible circumstance.

But he is far enough from accepting the conventional
orthodoxy of Dante which, referring all human action
to the simple formula of purgatory, heaven and hell,
leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of
Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of
the donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or
discredit of attracting some shadow of ecclesiastical cen-
sure. This Matteo Palmieri (two dim figures move
under that name in contemporary history) was the re-
puted author of a poem, still unedited, "La Citta Divina,"
which represented the human race as an incarnation of
those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither
for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of that earlier
Alexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine in-
tellect in that century was so curious. Botticelli's pic-

SANDRO BOTTICELLI 45

ture may have been only one of those familiar composi-
tions in which religious reverie has recorded its impres-
sions of the various forms of beatified existence
Glorias, as they were callec}, like that in which Giotto
painted the portrait of Dante; but somehow it was sus-
pected of embodying in a picture the wayward dream of
Palmieri, and the chapel where it hung was closed.
Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless about
philosophical theories, even when the philosopher is a
Florentine of the fifteenth century, and his work a poem
in terza rima. But Botticelli, who wrote a commentary
on Dante, and became the disciple of Savonarola, may
well have let such theories come and go across him.
True or false, the story interprets much of the peculiar
sentiment with which he infuses his profane and sacred
persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels, but
with a sense of displacement or loss about them the
wistfulness of exiles, conscious of a passion and energy
greater than any known issue of them explains, which
runs through all his varied work with a sentiment of
ineffable melancholy.

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of
heaven and hell, Botticelli accepts, that middle world in
which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no
great causes, and make great refusals. He thus sets for
himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any
moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work.
His interest is neither in the untempered goodness of
Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna's
Inferno; but with pen and women, in their mixed and
uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes
by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, bu*

46 THE RENAISSANCE

saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the
great things from which they shrink. His morality is
all sympathy ; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his
work somewhat more than is usual of the true com-
plexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he
is, so forcible a realist.

It is this Which gives to his Madonnas their unique
expression and charm. He has worked out in them a
distinct and peculiar type, definite enough in his own
jnind, for he has painted it over and over again, some-
times one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime
during that dark period when his thoughts were so heavy
upon him. Hardly any collection of note is without one
of these circular pictures, into which the attendant an-
gels depress their heads so naively. Perhaps you have
sometimes wondered why those peevish-looking Ma-
donnas, conformed to no acknowledged or obvious type
of beauty, attract you more and more, and often come
back to you when the Sistine Madonna and the Virgins
of Fra Angelico are forgotten. At first, contrasting them
with those, you may have thought that there was some-
thing in them mean or abject even, for the abstract lines
of the face have little nobleness, and the color is wan.
For with Botticelli she too, though she holds in her
hands the "Desire of all nations," is one of those who
are neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies; and her
choice is on her face. The white light on it is cast up
hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon
the ground, and the children look up with surprise at
the strange whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is in
the very caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze is
always far from her, and who has already that sweet

SANDRO BOTTICELLI 47

look of devotion which men have never been able alto-
gether to love, and which still makes the born saint an
object almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren. Once,
indeed, he guides her hand to transcribe in a book the
words of her exaltation, the Ave, and the Magnificat,
and the Gaude Maria, and the young angels, glad to
rouse her for a moment from her dejection, are eager
to hold the inkhorn and to support the book. But the
pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words
have no meaning for her, and her true children are those
others, among whom, in her rude home, the intolerable
honor came to her, with that look of wistful inquiry on
their irregular faces which you see in startled animals
gipsy children, such as those who, in Apennine villages,
still hold out their long, brown arms to beg of you, but
on Sundays become enfants du ch&ur, with their thick
black hair nicely combed, and fair white linen on their
sunburnt throats.

What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into
classical subjects, its most complete expression being a
picture in the Ufhzii, of Venus rising from the sea, in
which the grotesque emblems of the middle age, and a
landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange
draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with
a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a /figure that reminds
you of the faultless nude studies of Ingres. At first,
perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of de-
sign, which seems to recall all at once whatever you have
read of Florence in the fifteenth century ; afterwards you
may think that this quaintness must be incongruous with
the subject, and that the color is cadaverous or at least
cold. And yet, the more you come to understand what

^8 THE RENAISSANCE

imaginative coloring really is, that all color is no mere
delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon
them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the
better you will like this peculiar quality of color ; and
you will find that quaint design of Botticelli's a more
direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of the
Greeks themselves even of the finest period. Of the
Greeks as they really were, of their difference from our-
selves, of the aspects of their outward life, we know far
more than Botticelli, or his most learned contemporaries ;
but for us long familiarity has taken off the edge of the
lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to
the Hellenic spirit. But in pictures like this of Botti-
celli's you have a record of the first impression made
by it on minds turned back towards it, in almost painful
aspiration, from a world in which it had been ignored
so long; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of
realisation, with which Botticelli carries out his intention,
is the exact measure of the legitimate influence over the
human mind of the imaginative system of which this is
perhaps the central myth. The light is indeed cold
mere sunless dawn; but a later painter would have
cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the better
for that quietness in the morning air each long promon-
tory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go
forth to their labors until the evening; but she is awake
before them, and you might think that the sorrow in her
face was at the thought of the whole long day of love
yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows
hard across the grey water, moving forward the dainty-
lipped shell on which she sails, the sea "showing his
teeth/' as it moves, in thin lines of foam, and sucking in,

SANDRO BOTTICELLI 49

one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline,
plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as
Botticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all this
imagery to be altogether pleasurable; and it was partly
an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art
of that time, that subdued and chilled it. But this pre-
dilection for minor tones counts also; and what is un-
mistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived
the goddess of pleasure, as the depositary of a great
power over the lives of men.

I have said that the peculiar character of Botticelli is
the result of a blending in him of a sympathy for hu-
manity in its uncertain condition, its attractiveness, its
investiture at rarer moments in a character of loveliness
and energy, with his consciousness of the shadow upon
it of the great things from which it shrinks, and that
this conveys into his work somewhat more than paint-
ing usually attains of the true complexion of humanity.
He paints the story of the goddess of pleasure in other
episodes besides that of her birth from the sea, but
never without some shadow of death in the grey flesh
and wan flowers. He paints Madonnas, but they shrink
from the pressure of the divine child, and plead in un-
mistakable undertones for a warmer, lower humanity.
The same figure tradition connects it with Simonetta,
the Mistress of Giuliano de' Medici appears again as
Judith, returning home across the hill country, when the
great deed is over, and the moment of revulsion come,
when the olive branch in her hand is becoming a burthen ;
as Justice, sitting on a throne, but with a fixed look of
self-hatred which makes the sword in her hand seem

50 THE RENAISSANCE

that of a suicide ; and again as Veritas, in the allegorical
picture of Cfllumnia, where one may note in passing the
suggestiveness of an accident which identifies the image
of Truth with the person of Venus. We might trace
the same sentiment through his engravings ; but his share
in them is doubtful, and the object of this brief study
has been attained, if I have defined aright the temper in
which he worked.

But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like Botti-
celli a secondary painter, a proper subject for general
criticism? There are a few great painters, like Michel-
angelo or Leonardo, whose work has become a force in
general culture, partly for this very reason that they
have absorbed into themselves all such workmen as
Sandro Botticelli; and, over and above mere technical
or antiquarian criticism, general criticism may be very
well employed in that sort of interpretation which ad-
justs the position of these men to general culture,
whereas smaller men can be the proper subjects only of
technical or antiquarian treatment. But, besides those
great men, there is a certain number of artists who have
a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to
us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get
elsewhere ; and these, too, have their place in general cul-
ture, and must be interpreted to it by those who have
felt their charm strongly, and are often the object of a
special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate,
just because there is not about them the stress of a great
name and authority. Of this select number Botticelli is
one. He has the freshness, the uncertain and diffident
promise, which belong to the earlier Renaissance itself,

SANDRO BOTTICELLI 51,

and make it perhaps the most interesting period in the
history of the mind. In studying his work one begins to
understand to how great a place in human culture th*
art of Italy had been called.

1870.

LUCA BELLA ROBBIA

THE Italian sculptors of the earlier half of the fif-
teenth century are more than mere forerunners of the
great masters of its close, and often reach perfection,
within ,the narrow limits which they chose to impose on
their work. Their sculpture shares with the paintings
of Botticelli and the churches of Brunelleschi that pro-
found expressiveness, that intimate impress of an in-
dwelling soul, which is the peculiar fascination of the
art of Italy in that century. Their works have been
much neglected, and often almost hidden away amid the
frippery of modern decoration, and we come with some
surprise on the places where their fire still smolders.
One longs to penetrate into the lives of the men who
have given expression to so much power and sweetness.
But it is part of the reserve, the austere dignity and
simplicity of their existence, that their histories are for
the most part lost, or told but briefly. From their lives,
as from their work, all tumult of sound and color has
passed away. Mino, the Raphael of sculpture, Maso del
Rodario, whose works add a further grace to the church
of Como, Donatello even, one asks in vain for more
than a shadowy outline of their actual days.

Something more remains of Luca della Robbia ; some-
thing more of a history, of outward changes and for-
tunes, is expressed through his work. I suppose nothing
brings the real air of a Tuscan town so vividly to mind

LUCA DELLA ROBBIA 53

as those pieces of pale blue and white earthenware, by
which he is best known, like fragments of the milky sky
itself, fallen into the cool streets, and breaking into the
darkened churches. And no work is less imitable: like
Tuscan wine, it loses its savor when moved from its
birthplace, from the crumbling walls where it was first
placed. Part of the charm of this work, its grace and
purity and finish of expression, is common to all the
Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century; for Luca was
first of all a worker in marble, and his works in terra
cotta only transfer to a different material the principles
of his sculpture.

These Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century worked
for the most part in low relief, giving even to their monu-
mental effigies something of its depression of surface,
getting into them by this means a pathetic suggestion of
the wasting and etherealisation of death. They are
haters of all heaviness and emphasis, of strongly-opposed
light and shade, and seek their means of delineation
among those last refinements of shadow, which are al-
most invisible except in a strong light, and which the
finest pencil can hardly follow. The whole essence of
their work is expression, the passing of a smile over the
face of a child, the ripple of the air on a still day over
the curtain of a window ajar.

What is the precise value of this system of sculpture,
this low relief? Luca della Robbia, and the other
sculptors of the school to which he^ belongs, have before
them the universal problem of their art ; and this system
of low relief is the means by which they meet and over*'
come the special limitation of sculpture. '

That limitation results from the material and othef

54 THE RENAISSANCE

necessary conditions of all sculptured work, and con-
sists in the tendency of such work to a hard realism, a
one-sided presentment of mere form, that solid material
frame which only motion can relieve, a thing of heavy
shadows, and an individuality of expression pushed to
caricature. Against this tendency to the hard present-
ment of mere form trying vainly to compete with Jhe
reality of nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly
struggles ; each great system of sculpture resisting it in
its own way, etherealising, spiritualising, relieving its
stiffness, its heaviness, and death. The use of color in
sculpture is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, by
borrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture
effects by strictly appropriate means. To get not color,
but the equivalent of color ; to secure the expression and
the play of life ; to expand the too firmly fixed individ-
uality of pure, unrelieved, uncolored form : this is the
problem which the three great styles in sculpture have
solved in three different ways.

Allgemeinheit breadth, generality, universality, is
the word chosen by Winckelmann, and after him by
Goethe and many German critics, to express that law of
the most excellent Greek sculptors, of Pheidias and his
pupils, which prompted them constantly to seek the type
in, the individual, to abstract and express only what is
structural and permanent, to purge from the individual
all that belongs only to him, all the accidents, the feel*
ings and actions of the special moment, all that (because
in its own nature it endures but for a moment) is apt to
look like a frozen thing if one arrests it.

In this way their works came to be like some subtle
extract or essence, or almost like pure thoughts or ideas :

LUCA DELLA ROBBIA 55

and hence the breadth of humanity in them, that detach*
ment from the conditions of a particular place or people,
which has carried their influence far beyond the age
which produced them, and insured them universal ac-
ceptance.

That was the Greek way of relieving the hardness and
unspirituality of pure form. But it involved to a certain
degree the sacrifice of what we call expression; and a
system of abstraction which aimed always at the broad
and general type, at the purging away from the individ-
ual of what belonged only to him, and of the mere acci-
dents of a particular time and place, imposed upon the
range of effects open to the Greek sculptor limits some-
what narrowly defined. When Michelangelo came,
therefore, with a genius spiritualised by the reverie of
the middle age, penetrated by its spirit of inwardness
and introspection, living not a mere outward life like
the Greek, but a life full of intimate experiences, sor-
rows, consolations, a system which sacrificed so much of
what was inward and unseen could not satisfy him. To
him, lover and student of Greek sculpture as he was,
work which did not bring what was inward to the sur-
face, which was not concerned with individual expres-
sion, with individual character and feeling, the special
history of the special soul, was not worth doing at all.

And so, in a way quite personal and peculiar to him-
self, which often is, and always seems, the effect of
accident, he secured for his work individuality and in-
tensity of expression, while he avoided a too heavy
realism, that tendency to harden into caricature which
the representation of feeling in sculpture is apt to dis-
play. What time and accident, its centuries of darkness

$6 THE RENAISSANCE

under the furrows of the "little Melian farm/' have
done with singular felicity of touch for the Venus of
Melos, fraying its surface and softening its lines, so
that some spirit in the thing seems always on the point
of breaking out, as though in it classical sculpture had
advanced already one step into the mystical Christian
age, its expression being in the whole range of ancient
work most like that of Michelangelo's own: this effect
Michelangelo gains by leaving nearly all his sculpture in
a puzzling sort of incompleteness, which suggests rather
than realises actual form. Something of the wasting of
that snow-image which he molded at the command of
Piero de' Medici, when the snow lay one night in the
court of the Pitti palace, almost always lurks about it,
as if he had determined to make the quality of a task,
exacted from him half in derision, the pride of all his
work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness, sus-
pecting, however, that Michelangelo himself loved and
was loath to change it, and feeling at the same time that
they, too, would lose something if the half-realised form
ever quite emerged from the stone, so rough-hewn here,
so delicately finished there; and they have wished to
fathom the charm of this incompleteness. Well! that
incompleteness is Michelangelo's equivalent for color in
sculpture; it is his way of etherealizing pure form, of
relieving its stiff realism, and communicating to it
breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was a character-
istic, too, which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode
of living, his disappointments and hesitations. And it
was in reality perfect finish. In this way he combines
the utmost amount of passion and intensity with the

LUCA BELLA ROBBIA 57

sense of a yielding and flexible life : he gets not vitality
merely, but a wonderful force of expression.

Midway between these two systems the system of
the Greek sculptors and the system of Michelangelo
comes the system of Luca della Robbia and the other
Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century, partaking both
of the Allgemeinheit of the Greeks, their way of ex-
tracting certain select elements only of pure form and
sacrificing all tfie rest, and the studied incompleteness of
Michelangelo, relieving that sense of intensity, passion,
energy, which might otherwise have stiffened into cari-
cature. Like Michelangelo, these sculptors fill their
works with intense and individualised expression. Their
noblest works are the careful sepulchral portraits of par-
ticular persons the monument of Conte Ugo in the
Badia of Florence, of the youthful Medea Colleoni, with
the wonderful, long throat, in the chapel on the cool
north side of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at
^Bergamo monuments such as abound in the churches
of Rome, inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a
subdued Sabbatic joy, a kind of sacred grace and refine-
ment. And these elements of tranquillity, of repose, they
unite to an intense and individual expression by a sys-
tem of conventionalism as skilful and subtle as that of
the Greeks, repressing all such curves as indicate solid
form, and throwing the whole into low relief.

The life of Luca, a life of labor and frugality, with
no adventure and no excitement except what belongs to
the trial of new artistic processes, the struggle with new
artistic difficulties, the solution of purely artistic prob-
lems, fills the first seventy years of the fifteenth century.
After producing many works in marble for the Duome

j8 THE RENAISSANCE

and the Campanile of Florence, which place him among
the foremost masters of the sculpture of his age, he be-
came desirous to realise the spirit and manner of that
sculpture, in a humbler material, to unite its science, its
exquisite and expressive system of low relief, to the
homely art of pottery, to introduce those high qualities
into common things, to adorn and cultivate daily house-
hold life. In this he is profoundly characteristic of the
Florence of that century, of that in it which lay below
its superficial vanity and caprice, a certain old-world
modesty and seriousness and simplicity. People had not
yet begun to think that what was good art for churches
was not so good, or less fitted, for their own houses.
Luca's new work was in plain white earthenware at first,
a mere rough imitation of the costly, laboriously wrought
marble, finished in a few hours. But on this humble
path he found his way to a fresh success, to another
artistic grace. The fame of the oriental pottery, with its
strange, bright colors colors of art, colors not to be
attained in the natural stone mingled with the tradition
of the old Roman pottery of the neighborhood. The
little red, coral-like jars of Arezzo, dug up in that dis-
trict from time to time, are much prized. These colors
haunted Luca's fancy. "He still continued seeking some-
thing more/' his biographer says of him; "and instead
of making his figures of baked earth simply white, he
added the further invention of giving them color, to the
astonishment and delight of all who beheld them"
Cosa singolare, e multo utile per la state! a curious
thing, and very useful for summer-time, full of coolness
and repose for hand and eye. Luca loved the forms of
various fruits, and wrought them into all sorts of mar-

LUCA DELLA ROBBIA 55

velous frames and garlands, giving them their natural
colors, only subdued a little, a little paler than nature.

I said that the art of Luca della Robbia possessed in
an unusual measure that special characteristic which be-
longs to all the workmen of his school, a characteristic
which, even in the absence of much positive information
about their actual history, seems to bring those workmen
themselves very near to us. They bear the impress of
a personal quality, a prr found expressiveness, what the
French call intimite, by which is meant some subtler
sense of originality the seal on a man's work of what
is most inward and peculiar in his moods, and mannef
of apprehension: it is what we call expression, carried
to its highest intensity of degree. That characteristic
is rare in poetry, rarer still in art, rarest of all in the
abstract art of sculpture; yet essentially, perhaps, it is
the quality which alone makes work in the imaginative
order really worth having at all. It is because the works
of the artists of the fifteenth century possess this quality
in an unmistakable way that one is anxious to know all
that can be known about them and explain to one's self
the secret of their charm.

1872.

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO

CRITICS of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken as if
the only characteristic of his genius were a wonderful
strength, verging, as in the things of the imagination
great strength always does, on what is singular or
strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blos-
soming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works
of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispen-
sable. But that they shall give pleasure and exert a
charm over us is indispensable, too ; and this strangeness
must be sweet also a lovely strangeness. And to the
true admirers of Michelangelo this is the true type of
the Michelangelesque sweetness and strength, pleasure
with surprise, an energy of conception which seems at
every moment about to break through all the conditions
of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, a loveliness
found usually only in the simplest natural things ex
forti dulcedo.

In this way he sums up for them the whole character
of medieval art itself in that which distinguishes it most
clearly from classical work, the presence of a convulsive
energy in it, becoming in lower hands merely monstrous
or forbidding, and felt, even in its most graceful prod-
ucts, as a subdued quaintness or grotesque. Yet those
who feel this grace or sweetness in Michelangelo might
at the first moment be puzzled if they were asked wherein
precisely such quality resided. Men of inventive tern-

60

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 61

perament Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, as in
Michelangelo, people have for the most part been at-
tracted or repelled by the strength, while few have under-
stood his sweetness have sometimes relieved concep-
tions of merely moral or spiritual greatness, but with
little aesthetic charm of their own, by lovely accidents
or accessories, like the butterfly which alights on the
blood-stained barricade in Lcs Miserables or those sea-
birds for whom the monstrous Gilliatt comes to be as
some wild natural thing, so that they are no longer afraid
of him, in Les Travailleurs de la Mer. But the austere
genius of Michelangelo will not depend for its sweetness
on any mere accessories like these. The world of nat-
ural things has almost no existence for him ; "When one
speaks of him," says Grimm, "woods, clouds, seas, and
mountains disappear, and only what is formed by the
spirit of man remains behind"; and he quotes a few
slight words from a letter of his to Vasari as the single
expression in all he has left of a feeling for nature. He
has traced no flowers, like those with which Leonardo
stars over his gloomiest rocks ; nothing like the fret-
work of wings and flames in which Blake frames his
most startling conceptions. No forest-scenery like
Titian's fills his backgrounds, but only blank ranges of
rock, and dim vegetable forms as blank as they, as in a
world before the creation of the first five days.

Of the whole story of the creation he has painted only
the creation of the first man and woman, and, for him
at least, feebly, the creation of light. It belongs to* the
quality of his genius thus to concern itself almost exclu-
sively with the making of man. For him it is not, as in
the story. itself, the last and crowning act of a series of

62 THE RENAISSANCE

developments, but the first and unique act, the creation
of life itself in its supreme form, off-hand and imme-
diately, in the cold and lifeless stone. With him the
beginning of life has all the characteristics of resurrec-
tion ; it is like the recovery of suspended health or anima-
tion, with its gratitude, its effusion, and eloquence. Fair
as the young men of the Elgin marbles, the Adam of the
Sistine Chapel is unlike them in a total absence of that
balance and completeness which express so well the senti-
ment of a self-contained, independent life. In that lan-
guid figure there is something rude and satyr-like, some-
thing akin to the rugged hillside on which it lies. His
whole form is gathered into an expression of mere ex-
pectancy and reception; he has hardly strength enough
to lift his finger to touch the finger of the creator; yet a
touch of the finger-tips will suffice.

This creation of life life coming always as relief or
recovery, and always in strong contrast with the rough-
hewn mass in which it is kindled is in various ways
the motive of all his work, whether its immediate sub-
ject be Pagan or Christian, legend or allegory; and this,
although at least one-half of his work was designed for
the adornment of tombs the tomb of Julius, the tombs
of the Medici. Not the Judgment but the Resurrection
is the real subject of his last work in the Sistine Chapel ;
and his favorite Pagan subject is the legend of Leda, the
delight of the world breaking from the egg of a bird.
As I have already pointed out, he secures that ideality
of expression which in Greek sculpture depends on a
delicate system of abstraction, and in early Italian sculp-
ture on lowness of relief, by an incompleteness, which is
surely not always undesigned, and vrhich, as I think, no

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 63

one regrets, and trusts to the spectator to complete the
half-emergent form. And as his persons have some-
thing of the unwrought stone about them, so, as if to
realise the expression by which the old Florentine rec-
ords describe a sculptor master of live stone with
him the very rocks seem to have life. They have but
to cast away the dust and scurf that they may rise and
stand on their feet. He loved the very quarries of Car-
rara, those strange grey peaks which even at mid-day
convey into any scene from which they are visible some-
thing of the solemnity and stillness of evening, some-
times wandering among them month after month, till at
last their pale ashen colors seem to have passed into his
painting; and on the crown of the head of the David
there still remains a morsel of uncut stone, as if by one
touch to maintain its connection with the place from
which it was hewn.

And it is in this penetrative suggestion of life that the
secret of that sweetness of his is to be found. He gives
us indeed no lovely natural objects like Leonardo or
Titian, but only the coldest, most elementary shadowing
of rock or tree ; no lovely draperies and comely gestures
of life, but only the austere truths of human nature;
"simple persons" as he Replied in his rough way to the
querulous criticism of Julius the Second, that there was
no gold on the figures of the Sistine Chapel "simple
persons, who wore no gold on their garments"; but he
penetrates us with a feeling of that power which we
associate with all the warmth and fullness of the world,
the sense of which brings into one's thoughts a swarm
of birds and flowers and insects. The brooding spirit of

64 THE RENAISSANCE

life itself is there; and the summer may burst out in a
moment.

He was born in an interval of a rapid midnight jour-
ney in March, at a place in the neighborhood of Arezzo,
the thin, clear air of which was then thought to be favor-
able to the birth of children of great parts. He came of
a race of grave and dignified men, who, claiming kin-
ship with the family of Canossa, and some color of im-
perial blood in their veins, had, generation after genera-
tion, received honorable employment under the govern-
ment of Florence. His mother, a girl of nineteen years,
put him out to nurse at a country house among the hills
of Settignano, where every other inhabitant is a worker
in the marble quarries, and the child early became fa-
miliar with that strange first stage in the sculptor's art.
To this succeeded the influence of the sweetest and most
placid master Florence had yet seen, Domenico Ghir-
landajo. At fifteen he was at work among the curiosi-
ties of the garden of the Medici, copying and restoring
antiques, winning the condescending notice of the great
Lorenzo. He knew, too, how to excite strong hatreds;
and it was at this time that in a quarrel with a fellow-
student he received a blow on the face which deprived
him for ever of the comeliness of outward form.

It was through an accident that he came to study
those works of the early Italian sculptors which sug-
gested much of his own grandest work, and impressed
it with so deep a sweetness. He believed in dreams and
omens. One o^ his friends dreamed twice that Lorenzo,
then lately dend, appeared to him in grey and dusty
apparel. To Michelangelo this dream seemed to por-
tend the troubles which afterwards really came, and with

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 65

the suddenness which was characteristic of all his move-
ments, he left Florence. Having occasion to pass
through Bologna, he neglected to procure the little seal
of red wax which the stranger entering Bologna must
carry on the thumb of his right hand. He had no money
to pay the fine, and would have been thrown into prison
had not one of the magistrates interposed. He remained
in this man's house a whole year, rewarding his hospi-
tality by readings from the Italian poets whom he loved.
Bologna, with its endless colonnades and fantastic lean-
ing towers, can never have been one of the lovelier cities
of Italy. But about the portals of its vast unfinished
churches and its dark shrines, half hidden by votive
flowers and candles, lie some of the sweetest works of
the early Tuscan sculptors, Giovanni da Pisa and Jacopo
della Quercia, things as winsome as flowers ; and the year
which Michelangelo spent in copying these works was
not a lost year. It was now, on returning to Florence,
that he put forth that unique presentment of Bacchus,
which expresses, not the mirth fulness of the god of
wine, but his sleepy seriousness, his enthusiasm, his
capacity for profound dreaming. No one ever expressed
more truly than Michelangelo the notion of inspired
sleep, of faces charged with dreams. A vast fragment
of marble had long lain below the Loggia of Orcagna,
and many a sculptor had had his thoughts of a design
which should just fill this famous block of stone, cutting
the diamond, as it were, without loss. Under Michel-
angelo's hand it became the David which stood till lately
on the steps of the Palazzo Vecchio, when it was replaced
below the Loggia. Michelangelo was now thirty years
old, and his reputation was established. Three great

66 THE RENAISSANCE

works fill the remainder of his life three works often
interrupted, carried on through a thousand hesitations,
a thousand disappointments, quarrels with his patrons,
quarrels with his family, quarrels perhaps most of all
with himself the Sistine Chapel, the Mausoleum of
Julius the Second, and the Sacristy of San Lorenzo.

In the story of Michelangelo's life the strength, often
turning to bitterness, is not far to seek. A discordant
note sounds throughout it which almost spoils the music.
He "treats the Pope as the King of France himself would
not dare to treat him" : he goes along the streets of Rome
"like an executioner/' Raphael says of him. Once he
seems to have shut himself up with the intention of
starving himself to death. As we come, in reading his
life, on its harsh, untempered incidents, the thought again
and again arises that he is one of those who incur the
judgment of Dante, as having "wilfully lived in sadness."
Even his tenderness and pity are embittered by their
strength. What passionate weeping in that mysterious
figure which, in the Creation of Adam, crouches below
the image of the Almighty, as he comes with the forms
of things to be, woman and her progeny, in the fold of
his garment ! What a sense of wrong in those two cap-
tive youths, who feel the chains like scalding water on
their proud and delicate flesh ! The idealist who became
a reformer with Savonarola, and a republican superin-
tending the fortification of Florence the nest where he
was born, il nido ove naqqu'io, as he calls it once, in a
sudden throb of affection in its last struggle for liberty,
yet believed always that he had imperial blood in his
veins and was of the kindred of the great Matilda, had
within the depths of his nature some secret spring of

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 67

indignation or sorrow. We know little of his youth, but
all tends to make one believe in the vehemence of its
passions. Beneath the Platonic calm of the sonnets
there is latent a deep delight in carnal form and color.
There, and still more in the madrigals, he often falls into
the language of less tranquil affections; while some of
them have the color of penitence, as from a wanderer
returning home. He who spoke so decisively of the
supremacy in the imaginative world of the unveiled hu-
man form had not been always, we may think, a mere
Platonic lover. Vague and wayward his loves may have
been ; but they partook of the strength of his nature, and
sometimes, it may be, would by no means become music,
so that the comely order of his days was quite put out:
par che amaro ogni mio dolce io senta.

But his genius is in harmony with itself; and just as
in the products of his art we find resources of sweetness
within their exceeding strength, so in his own story also,
bitter as the ordinary sense of it may be, there are select
pages shut in among the rest pages one might easily
turn over too lightly, but which yet sweeten the whole
volume. The interest of Michelangelo's poems is that
they make us spectators of this struggle ; the struggle of
a strong nature to adorn and attune itself; the struggle
of a desolating passion, which yearns to be resigned and
sweet and pensive, as Dante's was. It is a consequence
of the occasional and informal character of his poetry,
that it brings us nearer to himself, his own mind and
temper, than any work done only to support a literary
reputation could possibly do. His letters tell us little
that is worth knowing about him a few poor quarrels
about money and commissions. But it is quite other-

68 THE RENAISSANCE

wise with these songs and sonnets, written down at odd
moments, sometimes on the margins of his sketches,
themselves often, unfinished sketches, arresting some
salient feeling or unpremeditated idea as it passed. And
it happens that a true study of these has become within
the last few years for the first time possible. A few of
the sonnets circulated widely in manuscript, and became
almost within Michelangelo's own lifetime a subject of
academical discourses. But they were first coftected in
a volume in 1623 by the great-nephew of Michelangelo,
Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger. He omitted much,
re-wrote the sonnets in part, and sometimes com-
pressed two or more compositions into one, always los-
ing something of the force and incisiveness of the origi-
nal. So the book remained, neglected even by Italians
themselves in the last century, through the influence of
that French taste which despised all compositions of
the kind, as it despised and neglected Dante. "His repu-
tation will ever be on the increase, because he is so little
read/' says Voltaire of Dante. But in 1858 the last of
the Buonarroti bequeathed to the municipality of Flor-
ence the curiosities of his family. Among them was a
precious volume containing the autograph of the son-
nets. A learned Italian, Signer Cesare Guasti, under-
took to collate this autograph with other manuscripts at
the Vatican and elsewhere, and in 1863 published a true
version of Michelangelo's poems, with dissertations and
a paraphrase. 1

People have often spoken of these poems as if they
were a mere cry of distress, a lover's complaint over

'The sonnets have been translated into English, with
skill and poetic taste, by Mr. J. A. Symonds.

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 69

the obduracy of Vittoria Colonna. But those who speak
thus forget that though it is quite possible that Michel-
angelo had seen Vittoria, that somewhat shadowy figure,
as early as 1537, yet their closer intimacy did not begin
till about the year 1542, when Michelangelo was nearly
seventy years old. Vittoria herself, an ardent neo-catho*
lie, vowed to perpetual widowhood since the news had
reached her, seventeen years before, that her husband,
the youthful and princely Marquess of Pescara, lay dead
of the wounds he had received in the battle of Pavia, was
then no longer an object of great passion. In a dialogue
written by the painter, Francesco d'Ollanda, we catch a
glimpse of them together in an empty church at Rome,
one Sunday afternoon, discussing, indeed, the characteris-
tics of various schools of art, but still more the writings
of Saint Paul, already following the ways and tasting
the sunless pleasures of weary people, whose care for
external things is slackening. In a letter still extant
he regrets that when he visited her after death he had
kissed her hands only. He made, or set to work to make,
a crucifix for her use, and two drawings, perhaps in
preparation for it, are now in Oxford. From allusions
in the sonnets, we may divine that when they first ap-
proached each other he had debated much with himself
whether this last passion would be the most unsoftening,
the most desolating of all un dolce amaro, un si e no
mi muovi. Is it carnal affection, or, del suo prestino
stato (of Plato's ante-natal state) il raggio ardent e?
The older, conventional criticism, dealing with the text
of 1623, had lightly assumed that all, or nearly all, the
sonnets were actually addressed to Vittoria herself ; but
Signor Guasti finds only four, or at most five, which can

TO THE RENAISSANCE

be so attributed on genuine authority. Still, there are
reasons which make him assign the majority of them
to the period between 1542 and 1547, and we may regard
the volume as a record of this resting-place in Michel-
angelo's story. We know how Goethe escaped from the
stress of sentiments too strong for him by making a
book about them; and for Michelangelo, to write down
his passionate thoughts at all, to express them in a
sonnet, was already in some measure to command, and
have his way with them

La vita del mia amor non il cor mio,
Ch' amor, di quel ch' io f amo, k senza core,

It was just because Vittoria raised no great passion that
the space in his life where she reigns has such peculiar
suavity; and the spirit of the sonnets is lost if we once
take them out of that dreamy atmosphere in which men
have things as they will, because the hold of ail outward
things upon them is faint and uncertain. Their prevail-
ing tone is a calm and meditative sweetness. The cry
of distress is indeed there, but as a mere residue, a trace
of bracing chalybeate salt, just discernible in the song
which rises like a clear, sweet spring from a charmed
space in his life.

This charmed and temperate space in Michelangelo's
life, without which its excessive strength would have
Deen so imperfect, which saves him from the judgment
of Dante on those who "wilfully lived in sadness," is
then a well-defined period there, reaching from the
year 1542 to the year 1547, the year of Vittoria's death.
In it the lifelong effort to tranquillise his vehement
emotions by withdrawing them into the region of ideal

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 71

sentiment, becomes successful; and the significance of
Vittoria is, that she realises for him a type of affection
which even in disappointment may charm and sweeten
his spirit.

In this effort to tranquillise and sweeten life by ideal-
ising its vehement sentiments, there were two great tra-
ditional types, either of which an Italian of the six-
teenth century might have followed. There was Dante,
whose little book of the Vita Nuova had early become
a pattern of imaginative love, maintained somewhat
feebly by the later followers of Petrarch; and, since
Plato had become something more than a name in Italy
by the publication of the Latin translation of his works
by Marsilio Ficino, there was the Platonic tradition also,
Dante's belief in the resurrection of the body, through
which, even in heaven, Beatrice loses for him no tinge
of flesh-color, or fold of raiment even ; and the Platonic
dream of the passage of the soul through one form of
life after another, with its passionate haste to escape
from the burden of bodily form altogether; are, for all
effects of art or poetry, principles diametrically opposite.
Now it is the Platonic tradition rather than Dante's that
has molded Michelangelo's verse. In many ways no
sentiment could have been less like Dante's love for
Beatrice than Michelangelo's for Vittoria Colonna.
Dante's comes in early youth: Beatrice is a child, with
the wistful, ambiguous vision of a child, with a char-
acter still unaccentuated by the influence of outward cir-
cumstances, almost expressionless. Vittoria, on the
other hand, is a woman already weary, in advanced age,
of grave intellectual qualities. Dante's story is a piece
of figiired work, inlaid with lovely incidents. In Michel-

72 THE RENAISSANCE

angelo's poems, frost and fire are almost the only im-
ages the refining fire of the goldsmith ; once or twice the
phoenix ; ice melting at the fire ; fire struck from the rock
which it afterwards consumes. Except one doubtful
allusion to a journey, there are almost no incidents. But
there is much of the bright, sharp, unerring skill, with
which in boyhood he gave the look of age to the head
of a faun by chipping a tooth from its jaw with a single
stroke of the hammer. For Dante, the amiable and de-
vout materialism of the middle age, sanctifies all that is
presented by hand and eye ; while Michelangelo is always
pressing forward from the outward beauty il bel del
fuor che agli occhi place, to apprehend the unseen
beauty; trascenda nella forma universal? that abstract
form of beauty, about which the Platonists reason.
And this gives the impression in him of something flit-
ting and unfixed, of the houseless and complaining
spirit, almost clairvoyant through the frail and yielding
flesh. He accounts for love at first sight by a previous
state of existence la dove io t f amai prlma.

And yet there are many points in which he is really
like Dante, and comes very near to the original image,
beyond those later and feebler followers in the wake of
Petrarch. He learns from Dante rather than from
Plato, that for lovers, the surfeiting of desire ove
gran desir gran copia affrena, is a state less happy than
poverty with abundance of hope una miseria di spe-
ranza plena. He recalls him in the repetition of the
words gentile and cortesia, in the personification of
Amor, in the tendency to dwell minutely on the physical
effects of the presence of a beloved object on the pulses
and the heart. Above all, he resembles Dante in the

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 73

warmth and intensity of his political utterances, for the
lady of one of his noblest sonnets was from the first
understood to be the city of Florence ; and he avers that
all must be asleep in heaven, if she, who was created
"of angelic form/' for a thousand lovers, is appropri-
ated by one alone, some Piero, or Alessandro de' Medici.
Once and again he introduces Love and Death, who
dispute concerning him. For, like Dante and all the
nobler souls of Italy, he is much occupied with thoughts
of the grave, and his true mistress is death death at
first as the worst of all sorrows and disgraces, with a
clod of the field for its brain; afterwards, death in its
high distinction, its detachment from vulgar needs, the
angry stains of life and action escaping fast.

Some of those whom the gods love die young. Thi3
man, because the gods loved him, lingered on to be of
immense, patriarchal age, till the sweetness it had taken
so long to secrete in him was found at last. Out of the
strong came forth sweetness, ex forti dulcedo. The
world had changed around him. The "new Catholicism"
had taken the place of the Renaissance. The spirit of
the Roman Church had changed : in the vast world's
cathedral which his skill had helped to raise for it, it
looked stronger than ever. Some of the first members
of the Oratory were among his intimate associates.
They were of a spirit as unlike as possible from that of
Lorenzo, or Savonarola even. The opposition of the
Reformation to art has been often enlarged upon; far
greater was that of the Catholic revival. But in thus
fixing itself in a frozen orthodoxy, the Roman Church
had passed beyond him, and he was a stranger to it. In
earlier' days, when its beliefs had been in a fluid state,

74 THE RENAISSANCE

he too might have been drawn into the controversy.
He might have been for spiritualising the papal sover-
eignty, like Savonarola ; or for adjusting the dreams of
Plato and Homer with the words of Christ, like Pico
of Mirandola. But things had moved onward, and such
adjustments were no longer possible. For himself, he
had long since fallen back on that divine ideal, which
above the wear and tear of creeds has been forming
itself for ages as the possession of nobler souls. And
now he began to feel the soothing influence which since
that time the Roman Church has often exerted over
spirits too independent to be its subjects, yet brought
within the neighborhood of its action; consoled and
tranquillised, as a traveller might be, resting for one
evening in a strange city, by its stately aspect and the
sentiment of its many fortunes, just because with those
fortunes he has nothing to do. So he lingers on; a
revenant, as the French say, a ghost out of another age,
in a world too coarse to touch his faint sensibilities very
closely; dreaming, in a worn-out society, theatrical in
its life, theatrical in its art, theatrical even in its de-
votion, on the morning of the world's history, on the
primitive form of man, on the images under which that
primitive world had conceived of spiritual forces.

I have dwelt on the thought of Michelangelo as thus
lingering beyond his time in a world not his own, be-
cause, if one is to distinguish the peculiar savor of his
work, he must be approached, not through his followers,
but through his predecessors; not through the marbles
of Saint Peter's, but through the work of the sculptors
of the fifteenth century over the tombs and altars of

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 75

Tuscany. He is the last of the Florentines, of those
on whom the peculiar sentiment of the Florence of
Dante and Giotto descended : he is the consummate
representative of the form that sentiment took in the
fifteenth century with men like Luca Signorelli and
Mino da Fiesole. Up to him the tradition of sentiment
is unbroken, the progress towards surer and more mature
methods of expressing that sentiment continuous. But
his professed disciples did not share this temper; they
are in love with his strength only, and seem not to feel
his grave and temperate sweetness. Theatricality is their
chief characteristic ; and that is a quality as little attribut-
able to Michelangelo as to Mino or Luca Signorelli.
With him, as with them, all is serious, passionate, im-
pulsive.

This discipleship of Michelangelo, this dependence of
his on the tradition of the Florentine schools, is nowhere
seen more clearly than in his treatment of the Creation.
The Creation of Man had haunted the mind of the
middle age like a dream; and weaving it into a hundred
carved ornaments of capital or doorway, the Italian
sculptors had early impressed upon it that pregnancy of
expression which seems to give it many veiled mean-
ings. As with other artistic conceptions of the middle
age, its treatment became almost conventional, handed
on from artist to artist, with slight changes, till it came
to have almost an independent and abstract existence of
its own. It was characteristic of the medieval mind thus
to give an independent traditional existence to a special
pictorial conception, or to a legend, like that of Tristram
or Tahnhauser, or even to the very thoughts and sub-
stance of a book, like the Imitation, so that no single

76 THE RENAISSANCE

workman could claim it as his own, and the book, the im-
age, the legend, had itself a legend, and its fortunes, and
a personal history; and it is a sign of the medievalism
of Michelangelo, that he thus receives from tradition
his central conception, and does but add the last touches,
in transferring it to the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
But there was another tradition of those earlier, more
serious Florentines, of which Michelangelo is the inherit-
or, to which he gives the final expression, and which
centres in the sacristy of San Lorenzo, as the tradition
of the Creation centres in the Sistine Chapel. It has
been said that all the great Florentines were preoccupied
with death. Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe! is the bur-
den of their thoughts, from Dante to Savonarola. Even
the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge to
his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of
people who had taken refuge in a country-house from
the danger of death by plague. It was to this inherited
sentiment, this practical decision that to be preoccupied
with the thought of death was in itself dignifying, and
a note of high quality, that the seriousness of the great
Florentines of the fifteenth century was partly due ; and
it was reinforced in them by the actual sorrows of their
times* How often, and in what various ways, had they
seen life stricken down, in their streets and houses.
La bella Simonetta dies in early youth, and is borne
to the grave with uncovered face. The young Cardinal
Jacopo di Portogallo dies on a visit to Florence insig-
nis forma fui et mirabili modestia his epitaph dares to
say. Antonio Rossellino carves his tomb in the church
of San Miniato, with care for the shapely hands and
feet, and sacred attire; Luca della Robbia puts his sky-

TrfE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 77

iest works there; and the tomb of the youthful and
princely prelate became the strangest and most beautiful
thing in that strange and beautiful place. After the
execution of the Pazzi conspirators, Botticelli is em-
ployed to paint their portraits. This preoccupation with
serious thoughts and sad images might easily have re-
sulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy villages of
the Rhine, or in the overcrowded parts of medieval
Paris, as it still does in many a village of the Alps, in
something merely morbid or grotesque, in the Danse
Macabre of many French and German painters, or the
grim inventions of Diirer. From such a result the Flor-
entine masters of the fifteenth century were saved by
the nobility of their Italian culture, and still more by
their tender pity for the thing itself. They must often
have leaned over the lifeless body, when aH was at
length quiet and smoothed out. After death, it is said,
the traces of slighter and more superficial dispositions
disappear; the lines become more simple and dignified;
only the abstract lines remain, in a great indifference.
They came thus to see death in its distinction. Then
following it perhaps one stage further, dwelling for a
moment on the point where all this transitory dignity
must break up, and discerning with no clearness a new
body, they paused just in time, and abstained, with a
sentiment of profound pity. *

Of all this sentiment Miche)mgefe/te'"the ;
and, first of all, of pity. Pie/a, wy, the pity of
gin Mother over the dead b/j^^Clfti^^lf
the pity of all mothers oven ajl (dead[>opsRtIe enli
ment, with its cruel "hard npjfei" :$feg. ^Nti 16 s ]
of his predilection. He h** &*** ^ in manyyl

78 THE RENAISSANCE

sketches, half-finished designs, finished and unfinished
groups of sculpture; but always as a hopeless, rayless,
almost heathen sorrow no divine sorrow, but mere pity
and awe at the stiff limbs and colorless lips. There is*
a drawing of his at Oxford, in which the dead body has
sunk to the earth between the mother's feet, with the
arms extended over her knees. The tombs in the sacristy
of San Lorenzo are memorials, not of any of the nobler
and greater Medici, but of Giuliano, and Lorenzo the
younger, noticeable chiefly for their somewhat early
death. It is mere human nature, therefore, which has
prompted the sentiment here. The titles assigned tra-
ditionally to the four symbolical figures, Night and Day,
The Twilight and The Dawn, are far too definite for
them; for these figures come much nearer to the mind
and spirit of their author, and are a more direct ex-
pression of his thoughts, than any merely symbolical
conceptions could possibly have been. They concentrate
and express, less by way of definite conceptions than by
the touches, the promptings of a piece of music, all those
vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments, which shift
and mix and are defined and fade again, whenever the
thoughts try to fix themselves with sincerity on the con-
ditions and surroundings of the disembodied spirit. I
suppose no one would come to the sacristy of San Lo-
renzo for consolation ; for seriousness, for solemnity, for
dignity of impression, perhaps, but not for consolation.
It is a place neither of consoling nor of terrible thoughts,
but of vague and wistful speculation. Here, again,
Michelangelo is the disciple not so much of Dante as
of the Platonists. Dante's belief in immortality is for-
mal, precise and firm, almost as much so as that of a

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 79

child, who thinks the dead will hear if you cry loud
enough. But in Michelangelo you have maturity, the
mind of the grown man, dealing cautiously and dispas-
sionately with serious things, and what hope he has is
based on the consciousness of ignorance ignorance of
man, ignorance of the nature of the mind, its origin and
capacities. Michelangelo is so ignorant of the spiritual
world, of the new body and its laws, that he does not
surely know whether the consecrated Host may not be
the body of Christ. And of all that range of sentiment
he is the poet, a poet still alive, and in possession of our
inmost thoughts dumb inquiry over the relapse after
death into the formlessness which preceded life, the
change, the revolt from that change, then the correcting,
hallowing, consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin
and vague, yet not more vague than the most definite
thoughts men have had through three centuries on a
matter that has been so near their hearts, the new body
a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over
those too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that
lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete,
aimless, helpless ; a thing with faint hearing, faint mem-
ory, faint power of touch ; a breath, a flame in the door-
way, a feather in the wind.

The qualities of the great masters in art or literature,
the combination of those qualities, the laws by which
they moderate, support, relieve each other, are not pe-
culiar to them ; but most often typical standards, or re-
vealing instances of the laws by which certain aesthetic
effects are produced. The old masters indeed are sim-
pler; their characteristics are written larger, and are
easier to' read, than the analogues of them in all th*

80 THE RENAISSANCE

mixed, confused productions of the modern mind. But
when once we have succeeded in defining for ourselves
those characteristics, and the law of their combination,
we have acquired a standard or measure which helps us
to put in its right place many a vagrant genius, many
an unclassified talent, many precious though imperfect
products of art. It is so with the components of the
true character of Michelangelo. That strange interfu-
sion of sweetness and strength is not to be found in
those who claimed to be his followers ; but it is found
in many of those who worked before him, and in many
others down to our own time, in William Blake, for in-
stance, and Victor Hugo, who, though not of his school,
and unaware, are his true sons, and help us to understand
him as he in turn interprets and justifies them. Per-
haps this is the chief use in studying old masters.

1871.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

HOMO MINISTER ET INTERPRES NATURAE

IN Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now
read it there are some variations from the first edition.
There, the painter who has fixed the outward type of
Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator,
holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philoso-
phy above Christianity. Words of his, trenchant enough
to justify this impression, are not recorded, and would
have been out of keeping with a genius of which one
characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined
and graceful mystery. The suspicion was but the time-
honored mode in which the world stamps its apprecia-
tion of one who has thoughts for himself alone, his
high indifference, his intolerance of the common forms
of things; and in the second edition the image was
changed into something fainter and more conventional.
But it is still by a certain mystery in his work, and some-
thing enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great
men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels. His life
is one of sudden revolts, with intervals in which he works
not at all, or apart from the main scope of his work.
By a strange fortune the pictures on which his more
popular fame rested disappeared early from the world,
like the Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely
with the product of meaner hands, like the Last Supper,

62 THE RENAISSANCE

His type of beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger
number than it delights, and seems more than that of
Any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some
scheme of the world within; so that he seemed to his
contemporaries to be the possessor of some unsancti-
fied and secret wisdom; as to Michelet and others to
have anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his
genius, and crowds all his chief work into a few tor-
mented years of later life ; yet he is so possessed by his
genius that he passes unmoved through the most tragic
events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one
who comes across them by chance on some secret er-
rand.

His legend, as the French say, with the anecdotes
which every one remembers, is one of the most brilliant
chapters of Vasari. Later writers merely copied it, un-
til, in 1894, Carlo Amoretti applied to it a criticism
which left hardly a date fixed, and not one of those an-
ecdotes untouched. The various questions thus raised
have since that time become, one after another, subject?
of special study, and mere antiquarianism has in this
direction little more to do. For others remain the edit-
ing of the thirteen books of his manuscripts, and the
separation by technical criticism of what in his reputed
works is really his, from what is only half his, or the
work of his pupils. But a lover of strange souls may
still analyse for himself the impression made on him by
those works, and try to reach through it a definition of
the chief elements of Leonardo's genius. The legend,
as corrected and enlarged by its critics, may now and
then intervene to support the results of this analysis.

His life has three divisions thirty years at Florence,

LEONARDO DA VINCI 83

nearly twenty years at Milan, then nineteen years of
wandering, till he sinks to rest under the protection of
Francis the First at the Chateau de Clou. The dis-
honor of illegitimacy hangs over his birth. Piero
Antonio, his father, was of a noble Florentine house, of
Vinci in the Val d'Arno, and Leonardo, brought up deli-
cately among the true children of that house, was the
love-child of his youth, wit hthe keen, puissant nature
such children often have. We see him in his boyhood
fascinating all men by his beauty, improvising music
and songs, buying the caged birds and setting them free,
as he walked the streets of Florence, fond of odd bright
dresses and spirited horses.

From his earliest years he designed many objects,
and constructed models in relief, of which Vasari men-
tions some of women smiling. His father, pondering
over this promise in the child, took him to the workshop
of Andrea del Verrocchio, then the most famous artist
in Florence. Beautiful objects lay about there reli-
quaries, pyxes, silver images for the pope's chapel at
Rome, strange fancy-work of the middle age, keeping
odd company with fragments of antiquity, then but lately
discovered. Another student Leonardo may have seen
there a lad into whose soul the level light and aerial
illusions of Italian sunsets had passed, in after days fa-
mous as Perugino. Verrocchio was an artist of the
earlier Florentine type, carver, painter, and worker in
metals, in one ; designer, not of pictures only, but of all
things for sacred or household use, drinking-vessels,
ambries, instruments of music, making them all fair to
look upon, filling the common ways of life with the
reflection 'of some far-off brightness; and years of pa-"

84 THE RENAISSANCE

tience had refined his hand till his work was now sought
after from distant places.

It happened that Verrocchio was employed by the
brethren of Vallombrosa to paint the Baptism of Christ,
and Leonardo was allowed to finish an angel in the left-
hand corner. It was one of those moments in which the
progress of a great thing here, that of the art of Italy
presses hard on the happiness of an individual, through
whose discouragement and decrease, humanity, in more
fortunate persons, comes a step nearer to its final suc-
cess.

For beneath the cheerful exterior of the mere well-
paid craftsman, chasing brooches for the copes of Santa
Maria Novella, or twisting metal screens for the tombs
of the Medici, lay the ambitious desire to expand the
destiny of Italian art by a larger knowledge and insight
into things, a purpose in art not unlike Leonardo's still
unconscious purpose; and often, in the modelling of
drapery, or of a lifted arm, or of hair cast back from
the face, there came to him something of the freer
manner and richer humanity of a later age. But in this
Baptism the pupil had surpassed the master; and Ver-
rocchio turned away as one stunned, and as if his sweet
earlier work must thereafter be distasteful to him, from
the bright animated angel of Leonardo's hand.

The angel may still be seen in Florence, a space of
sunlight in the cold, labored old picture; but the legend
is* true only in sentiment, for painting had always been
the art by which Verrocchio set least store. And as in
a sense he anticipates Leonardo, so to the last Leonardo
recalls the studio of Verrocchio, in the love of beautiful
toys, such as the vessel of water for a mirror, and lovely

LEONARDO DA VINCI 85

needle-work about the implicated hands in the Modesty
and Vanity, and of reliefs, like those cameos which in
the Virgin of the Balances hang all round the girdle
of Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such
as the agates in the Saint Anne y and in a hieratic precise-
ness and grace, as of a sanctuary swept and garnished.
Amid all the cunning and intricacy of his Lombard man-
ner this never left him. Much of it there must have
been in that lost picture of Paradise, which he prepared
as a cartoon for tapestry, to be woven in the looms of
Flanders. It was the perfection of the older Floren-
tine style of miniature-painting, with patient putting of
each leaf upon the trees and each flower in the grass,
where the first man and woman were standing.

And because it was -the perfection of that style, it
awoke in Leonardo some seed of discontent which lay
in the secret places of his nature. For the way to per-
fection is through a series of disgusts ; and this picture
all that he had done so far in his life at Florence
was after all in the old slight manner. His art, if it
was to be something in the world, must be weighted
with more of the meaning of nature and purpose of hu-
manity. Nature was "the true mistress of higher intel-
ligences." He^ plunged, then, into the study of nature.
And in doing this he followed the manner of the older
students; he brooded over the hidden virtues of plants
and crystals, the lines traced by the stars as they moved
in the sky, over the correspondences which exist between
the different orders of living things, through which, to
eyes opened, they interpret each other; and for years
he seemed to those about him as one listening to a
silent for other men.

86 THE RENAISSANCE

He learned here the art of going deep, of tracking
the sources of expression to their subtlest retreats, the
power of an intimate presence in the things he handled.
He did not at once or entirely desert his art; only he
was no longer the cheerful, objective painter, through
whose soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of
Florentine life, only made a little mellower and more
pensive by the transit, passed on to the white wall. He
wasted many days in curious tricks of design, seeming
to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of
line and color. He was smitten with a love of the im-
possible the perforation of mountains, changing the
course of rivers, raising great buildings, such as the
church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those feats
for the performance of which natural magic professed
to have the key. Later writers, indeed, see in these ef-
forts an anticipation of modern mechanics ; in him they
were rather dreams, thrown off by the overwrought and
laboring brain. Two ideas were especially confirmed
in him, as reflexes of things that had touched his brain
in childhood beyond the depth of other impressions the
smiling of women and the motion of great waters.

And in such studies some interfusion of the extremes
of beauty and terror shaped itself, as an image that
might be seen and touched, in the mind of this gracious
youth, so fixed that for the rest of his life it never left
him. As if catching glimpses of it in the strange eyes
or hair of chance people, he would follow such about
the streets of Florence till the sun went down, of whom
many sketches of his remain. Some of these are full
of a curious beauty, that remote beauty which may be
apprehended only by those who have sought it care-

LEONARDO DA VINCI 8;

fully ;, who, starting with acknowledged types of beauty,
have refined as far upon these, as these refine upon the
world of common forms. But mingled inextricably with
this there is an element of mockery also ; so that, whether
in sorrow or scorn, he caricatures Dante even. Legions
of grotesques sweep under his hand ; for has not nature,
too, her grotesques the rent rock, the distorting lights
of evening on lonely roads, the unveiled structure of
man in the embryo, or the skeleton ?

All these swarming fancies unite in the Medusa of
the Uffizvi. Vasari's story of an earlier Medusa, painted
on a wooden shield, is perhaps an invention; and yetj
properly told, has more of the air of truth about it than
anything else in the whole legend. For its real subject
is not the serious work of a man, but the experiment of
a child. The lizards and glow-worms and other strange
small creatures which haunt an Italian vineyard bring
before one the whole picture of a child's life in a Tus-
can dwelling half castle, half farm and are as true
to nature as the pretended astonishment of the father
for whom the boy has prepared a surprise. It was not
in play that he painted that other Medusa, the one great
picture which he left behind him in Florence. The sub-
ject has been treated in various ways; Leonardo alone
cuts to its centre; he alone realises it as the head of a
corpse, exercising its powers through all the circum-
stances of death. What may be called the fascination
of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely
finished beauty. About the dainty lines of the cheek the
bat flits unheeded. The delicate snakes seem literally
strangling each other in terrified struggle to escape from
the Medufca brain. The hue which violent death always

88 THE RENAISSANCE

brings with it is in the features; features singularly
massive and grand, as we catch them inverted, in a dex-
terous foreshortening, crown foremost, like a great calm
stone against which the wave of serpents breaks.

The science of that age was all divination, clairvoy-
ance, unsubjected to our exact modern formulas, seeking
in an instant of vision to concentrate a thousand experi-
ences. Later writers, thinking only of the well-ordered
treatise on painting which a Frenchman, RafTaelle du
Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled from
Leonardo's bewildered manuscripts, written strangely,
as his manner was, from right to left, have imagined a
rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order would
have been little in accordance with the restlessness of
his character ; and if we think of him as the mere rea-
soner who subjects design to anatomy, and composition
to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have that im-
pression which those around Leonardo received from
him. Poring over his crucibles, making experiments
with color, trying, by a strange variation of the alche-
mist's dream, to discover the secret, not of an elixir to
make man's natural life immortal, but of giving immor-
tality to the subtlest and most delicate effects of paint-
ing, he seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the ma-
gician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowl-
edge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the
key. What his philosophy seems to have been most
like is that of Paracelsus or Cardan ; and much of the
spirit of the older alchemy still hangs about it, with
its confidence in short cuts and odd byways to knowl-
edge. To him philosophy was to be something giving
strange swiftness and double sight, divining the sources

LEONARDO DA VINCI 89

of springs beneath the earth or of expression beneath
the human countenance, clairvoyant of occult gifts in
common or uncommon things, in the reed at the brook-
side, or the star which draws near to us but once in a
century. How, in this way, the clear purpose was over-
clouded, the fine chaser's hand perplexed, we but dimly
see; the mystery which at no point quite lifts from Leon-
ardo's life is deepest here. But it is certain that at one
period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist.

The year 1483 the year of the birth of Raphael and
the thirty-first of Leonardo's life is fixed as the date
of his visit to Milan by the letter in which he recom-
mends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to tell
him, for a price, strange secrets in the art of war. It
was that Sforza who murdered his young nephew by
slow poison, yet was so susceptible of religious impres-
sions that he blended mere earthly passion with a sort
of religious sentimentalism, and who took for his device
the mulberry-tree symbol, in its long delay and sudden
yielding of flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which
economises all forces for an opportunity of sudden and
sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had gone before him,
and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, tke
first Duke of Milan. As for Leonardo himself, he came
not as an artist at all, or careful of the fame of one; but
as a player on the harp, a strange harp of silver of his
own construction, shaped in some curious likeness to
a horse's skull. The capricious spirit of Ludovico was
susceptible also to the power of music, and Leonardo's
nature had a kind of spell in it. Fascination is always
the word descriptive of him. No portrait of his youth
remains ; but all tends to make us believe that up to this

90 THE RENAISSANCE

time some charm of voice and aspect, strong enough to
balance the disadvantage of his birth, had played about
him. His physical strength was great; it was said that
he could bend a horseshoe like a coil of lead.

The Duomo, work of artists from beyond the Alps,
so fantastic to the eye of a Florentine used to the mel-
low, unbroken surfaces of Giotto and Arnolfo, was then
in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of Milan,
moved a people as fantastic, changeful, and dreamlike.
To Leonardo least of all men could there be anything
poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment which grew
there. It was a life of brilliant sins and exquisite amuse-
ments: Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pa-
geants ; and it suited the quality of his genius, composed,
in almost equal parts, of curiosity and the desire of
beauty, to take things as they came.

Curiosity and the desire of beauty these are the two
elementary forces in Leonardo's genius; curiosity, often
in conflict with the desire of beauty, but generating, in
union with it, a type of subtle and curious grace.

The movement of the fifteenth century was twofold;
partly the Renaissance, partly also the coming of what
is called the "modern spirit," with its realism, its ap-
peal to experience. It comprehended a return to an-
tiquity, and a return to nature. Raphael represents the
return to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature. In
this return to nature, he was seeking to satisfy a bound-
less curiosity by her perpetual surprises, a microscopic
sense of finish by her finesse, or delicacy of operation,
that subtilitas naturae which Bacon notices. So we find
him often in intimate relations with men of science,
with Fra Luca Paccioli the mathematician, and the

LEONARDO DA VINCI 91

anatomist Marc Antonio della Torre. His observations
and experiments fill thirteen volumes of manuscript;
and those who can judge describe him as anticipating
long before, by rapid intuition, the later ideas of science.
He explained the obscure light of the unilluminated part
of the moon, knew that the sea had once covered the
mountains which contain shells, and of the gathering of
the equatorial waters above the polar.

He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of
nature preferred always the more to the less remote,
what, seeming exceptional, was an instance of law more
refined, the construction about things of a peculiar at-
mosphere and mixed lights. He paints flowers with such
curious felicity that different writers have attributed to
him a fondness for particular flowers, as Clement the
cyclamen, and Rio the jasmin; while, at Venice, there
is a stray leaf from his portfolio dotted all over with
studies of violets and the wild rose. In him first appears
the taste for what is bizarre or recherche in landscape ;
hollow places full of the green shadow of bituminous
rocks, ridged reefs of trap-rock which cut the water into
quaint sheets of light, their exact antitype is in our
own western seas; all the solemn effects of moving
water. You may follow it springing from its distant
source among the rocks on the heath of the Madonna
of the Balances, passing, as a little fall, into the treach-
erous calm of the Madonna of the Lake, as a goodly
river next, below the cliffs of the Madonna of the Rocks,
washing the white walls of its distant villages, stealing
out in a network of divided streams in La Gioconda to
the seashore of the Saint Anne that delicate place,
yrhere the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher

92 THE RENAISSANCE

over the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick
upon the sand, and the tops of the rocks, to which the
waves never rise, are green with grass, grown fine as
hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy,
but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a
thousand with a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo's
strange veil of sight things reach him so ; in no ordinary
night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some
brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through
deep water.

And not into nature only; but he plunged also into
human personality, and became above all a painter of
portraits; faces of a modelling more skilful than has
been seen before or since, embodied with a reality which
almost amounts to illusion, on the dark air. To take a
character as it was, and delicately sound its stops, suited
one so curious in observation, curious in invention. He
painted thus the portraits of Ludovico's mistresses, Lu-
cretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the poetess, of Lu-
dovico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice. The portrait
of Cecilia Galerani is lost, but that of Lucretia Crivelli
has been identified with La Belle Feroniere of the
Louvre, and Ludovico's pale, anxious face still remains
in the Ambrosian library. Opposite is the portrait of
Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have caught
some presentiment of early death, painting her precise
and grave, full of the refinement of the dead, in sad
earth-colored raiment, set with pale stones.

Sometimes this curiosity came in conflict with the de-
sire of beauty ; it tended to make him go too far below
that outside of things in which art really begins and ends,
struggle between the reason and its ideas, and the

LEONARDO DA VINCI 93

senses, the desire of beauty, is the key to Leonardo's
life at Milan his restlessness, his endless re-touchings,
his odd experiments with color. How much must he leave
unfinished, how much recommence! His problem was
the transmutation of ideas into images. What he had
attained so far had been the mastery of that earlier
Florentine style, with its naive and limited sensuousness.
Now he was to entertain in this narrow medium those
divinations of a humanity too wide for it, that larger
vision of the opening world, which is only not too much
for the great, irregular art of Shakespeare; and every-
where the effort is visible in the work of his hands.
This agitation, this perpetual delay, give him an air of
weariness and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming
at an impossible effect, to do something that art, that
painting, can never do. Often the expression of physi-
cal beauty at this or that point seems strained and
marred in the effort, as in those heavy German fore-
heads too heavy and German for .perfect beauty.

For there was a touch of Germany in that genius
which, as Goethe said, had "thought itself weary"
rnude sich gedacht. What an anticipation of modern
Germany, for instance, in that debate on the question
whether sculpture or painting is the nobler art ! x But
there is this difference between him and the German,
that, with all that curious science, the German would
have thought nothing more was needed. The name of
Goethe himself reminds one how great for the artist
may be the danger of over-much science; how Goethe,

*How princely, how characteristic of Leonardo, the answer,
Quanta piu, un' arte porta seco fatica di corpo, tanto pfa }
vile!

94 THE RENAISSANCE

who, in the Elective Affinities and the first part of Faust,
does transmute ideas into images, who wrought many
such transmutations, did not invariably find the spell-
word, and in the second part of Faust presents us with
a mass of science which has almost no artistic character
at all. But Leonardo will never work till the happy mo-
ment comes that moment of bien-etre, which to imagi-
native men is a moment of invention. On this he waits
with a perfect patience ; other moments are but a prep-
aration, or after-taste of it. Few men distinguish be-
tween them as jealously as he. Hence so many flaws
even in the choicest work. But for Leonardo the dis-
tinction is absolute, and, in the moment of bien-etre,
the alchemy complete : the idea is stricken into color and
imagery : a cloudy mysticism is refined to a subdued and
graceful mystery, and painting pleases the eye while it
satisfies the soul.

This curious beauty is seen above all in his drawings,
and in these chiefly in the abstract grace of the bound-
ing lines. Let us take some of these drawings, and
pause over them awhile; and, first, one of those at
Florence the heads of a woman and a little child, set
side by side, but each in its own separate frame. First
of all, there is much pathos in the reappearance, in the
fuller curves of the face of the child, of the sharper,
more chastened lines of the worn and older face, which
leaves no doubt that the heads are those of a little child
and its mother. A feeling for maternity is indeed al-
ways characteristic of Leonardo; and this feeling is
further indicated here by the half-humorous pathos of
the diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child. You
may note a like pathetic power in drawings of a young

LEONARDO DA VINCI 93

man, seated in a stooping posture, his face in his hands,
as in sorrow; of a slave sitting in an uneasy inclined
attitude, in some brief interval of rest; of a small Ma-
donna and Child, peeping sideways in half-reassured
terror, as a mighty griffin with batlike wings, one of
Leonardo's finest inventions, descends suddenly from the
air to snatch up a great wild beast wandering near them*
But note in these, as that which especially belongs to
art, the contour of the young man's hair, the poise of
the slave's arm above his head, and the curves of the
head of the child, following the little skull within, thin
and fine as some sea-shell worn by the wind.

Take again another head, still more full of sentiment,
but of a different kind, a little drawing in red chalk
which every one will remember who has examined at all
carefully the drawings by old masters at the Louvre. It
is a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own
hair, the cheek-line in high light against it, with some-
thing voluptuous and full in the eye-lids and the lips.
Another drawing might pass for the same face in child-
hood, with parched and feverish lips, but much sweetness
in the loose, short-waisted childish dress, with necklace
and bulla, and in the daintily bound hair. We might
take the thread of suggestion which these two drawings
offer, when thus set side by side, and, following it
through the drawings at Florence, Venice, and Milan,
construct a sort of series, illustrating better than any-
thing else Leonardo's type of womanly beauty. Daugh-
ters of Herodias, with their fantastic head-dresses knot-
ted and folded so strangely to leave the dainty oval of
the face disengaged, they are not of the Christian fam-
ily, or of 'Raphael's. They are the clairvoyants, through

96 THE RENAISSANCE

whom, as through delicate instruments, one becomes
aware of the subtler forces of nature, and the modes of
their action, all that is magnetic in it, all those finer con-
ditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of
operation which constitutes them spiritual, where only
the final nerve and the keener touch can follow. It is
as if in certain significant examples we actually saw
those forces at their work on human flesh. Nervous,
electric, faint always with some inexplicable faintness,
these people seem to be subject to exceptional condi-
tions, to feel powers at work in the common air unfelt
by others, to become, as it were, the receptacle of them,
and pass them on to us in a chain of secret influences.
But among the more youthful heads there is one at
Florence which Love chooses for its own the head of
a young man, which may well be the likeness of Andrea
Salaino, beloved of Leonardo for his curled and waving
hair belli capelli ricci e inanellati and afterwards his
favorite pupil and servant. Of all the interests in living
men and women which may have filled his life at Milan,
this attachment alone is recorded. And in return Salaino
identified himself so entirely with Leonardo, that the
picture of Saint Anne, in the Louvre, has been attributed
to him. It illustrates Leonardo's usual choice of pupils,
men of some natural charm of person or intercourse
like Salaino, or men of birth and princely habits of life
like Francesco Melzi men with just enough genius to
be capable of initiation into his secret, for the sake of
which they were ready to efface their own individuality.
Among them, retiring often to the villa of the Melzi at
Canonica al Vaprio, he worked at his fugitive manu-
scripts and sketches, working for the present hour, and

LEONARDO DA VINCI 97

for a few only, perhaps chiefly for himself. Other ar-
tists have been as careless of present or future applause,
in self-forgetfulness, or because they set moral or po-
litical ends above the ends of art ; but in him this solitary
culture of beauty seems to have hung upon a kind of
self-love, and a carelessness in the work of art of all
but art itself. Out of the secret places of a unique tem-
perament he brought strange blossoms and fruits hith-
erto unknown ; and for him, the novel impression con-
veyed, the exquisite effect woven, counted as an end in
itself a perfect end.

And these pupils of his acquired his manner so thor-
oughly, that though the number of Leonardo's authentic
works is very small indeed, ther^is a multitude of other
men's pictures through which we undoubtedly see him,
and come very near to his genius. Sometimes, as in
the little picture of the Madonna of the Balances, in
which, from the bosom of His mother, Christ weighs
the pebbles of the brook against the sins of men, we
have a hand, rough enough by contrast, working upon
some fine hint or sketch of his. Sometimes, as in the sub-
jects of the Daughter of Herodias and the Head of John
the Baptist, the lost originals have been re-echoed and
varied upon again and again by Luini and others. At
other times the original remains, but has been a mere
theme or motive, a type of which the accessories might
be modified or changed; and these variations have but
brought out the more the purpose, or expression of the
original. It is so with the so-called Saint John the Bap-
tist of the Louvre one of the few naked figures Leon-
ardo painted whose delicate brown flesh and woman's
hair no qne would go out into the wilderness to seek,

98 THE RENAISSANCE

and whose treacherous smile would have us understand
something far beyond the outward gesture or circum-
stance. But the long, reedlike cross in the hand, which
suggests Saint John the Baptist, becomes faint in a
copy at the Ambrosian Library, and disappears altogether
in another version, in the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa. Re-
turning from the latter to the original, we are no longer
surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the Bacchus
which hangs near it, and which set Theophile Gautier
thinking of Heine's notion of decayed gods, who, to
maintain themselves, after the fall of paganism, took
employment in the new religion. We recognise one of
those symbolical inventions in which the ostensible sub-
ject is used, not as m^er for definite pictorial realisa-
tion, but as the starting-point of a train of sentiment,
subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one ever ruled
over the mere subject in hand more entirely than Leon-
ardo, or bent it more dexterously to purely artistic ends.
And so it comes to pass that though he handles sacred
subjects continually, he is the most profane of painters ;
the given person or subject, Saint John in the Desert,
or the Virgin on the knees of Saint Anne, is often merely
the pretext for a kind of work which carries one alto-
gether beyond the range of its conventional associations.
About the Last Supper, its decay and restorations,
a whole literature has risen up, Goethe's pensive sketch
of its sad fortunes being perhaps the best. The death
in childbirth of the Duchess Beatrice was followed in
Ludovico by one of those paroxysms of religious feeling
which in him were constitutional. The low, gloomy
Dominican church of Saint Mary of the Graces had been
the favorite oratory of Beatrice. She had spent her last

LEONARDO DA VINCI 99

days there, full of sinister presentiments; at last it had
been almost necessary to remove her from it by. force ;
and now it was here that mass was said a hundred times
a day for her repose. On the damp wall of the refectory,
oozing with mineral salts, Leonardo painted the Last
Supper. Effective anecdotes were told about it, his
retouchings and delays. They show him refusing to
work except at the moment of invention, scornful of any
one who supposed that art could be a work of mere in-
dustry and rule, often coming the whole length of
Milan to give a single touch. He painted it, not in
fresco, where all must be impromptu, but in oils, the new
method which he had been one of the first to welcome,
because it allowed of so many afterthoughts, so refined
a working out of perfection. It turned out that on a
plastered wall no process could have been less durable.
Within fifty years it had fallen into decay. And now
we have to turn back to Leonardo's own studies, above
all to one drawing of the central head at the Brera,
which, in a union of tenderness and severity in the face-
lines, reminds one of the monumental work of Mine
da Fiesole, to trace it as it was.

Here was another effort to lift a given subject out of
the range of its traditional associations. Strange, after
all the mystic developments of the middle age, was the
effort to see the Eucharist, not as the pale Host of the
altar, but as one taking leave of his friends. Five years
afterwards the young Raphael, at Florence, painted it
with sweet and solemn effect in the refectory of Saint
Onofrio; but still with all the mystical unreality of
the school of Perugino. Vasari pretends that the cen-
tral head was never finished. But finished or unfinished,

ioo THE RENAISSANCE

or owing part of its effect to a mellowing decay; the
head of Jesus does but consummate the sentiment of
the whole company ghosts through which you see the
wall, faint as the shadows of the leaves upon the wall
on autumn afternoons. This figure is but the faintest,
the most spectral of them all.

The Last Supper was finished in 1497; in 1498 the
French entered Milan, and whether or not the Gascon
bowmen used it as a mark for their arrows, the model
of Francesco Sforza certainly did not survive. What, in
that age, such work was capable of being of what
nobility, amid what racy truthfulness to fact we may
judge from the bronze statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni
on horseback, modelled by Leonardo's master, Ver-
rocchio (he died of grief, it was said, because, the
mold accidentally failing, he was unable to complete
it), still standing in the piazza of Saint John and Saint
Paul at Venice. Some traces of the thing may remain
in certain of Leonardo's drawings, and perhaps also, by
a singular circumstance, in a far-off town of France.
For Ludovico became a prisoner, and ended his days
at Loches in Touraine. After many years of captivity
in the dungeons below, where all seems sick with barbar-
ous feudal memories, he was allowed at last, it is said,
to breathe fresher air for awhile in one of the rooms
of the great tower still shown, its walls covered with
strange painted arabesques, ascribed by tradition to his
hand, amused a little, in this way, through the tedious
years. In those vast helmets and human faces and
pieces of armor, among which, in great letters, the motto
Injelix Sum is woven in and out, it is perhaps not
too fanciful to see the fruit of a wistful after-dreaming

LEONARDO DA VINCI 101

over Leonardo's sundry experiments on the armed figure
of the great duke, which had occupied the two so much
during the days of their good fortune at Milan.

The remaining years of Leonardo's life are more or
less years of wandering. From his brilliant life at court
he had saved nothing, and he returned to Florence a
poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spirit excited:
the next four years are one prolonged rapture of ecstasy
of invention. He painted now the pictures of the Louvre*
his most authentic works, which came there straight from
the cabinet of Francis the First, at Fontainebleau. One
picture of his, the Saint Anne not the Saint Anne of
the Louvre, but a simple cartoon, now in London
revived for a moment a sort of appreciation more com-
mon in an earlier time, when good pictures had still
seemed miraculous. For two days a crowd of people
of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the
chamber where it hung, and gave Leonardo a taste of the
"triumph" of Cimabue. But his work was less with the
saints than with the living women of Florence. For he
lived still in the polished society that he loved, and in
the houses of Florence, left perhaps a little subject to
light thoughts by the death of Savonarola the latest
gossip (1869) is of an undraped Monna Lisa, found in
some out-of-the-way corner of the late Orleans collec-
tion he saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third
wife of Francesco del Giocondo. As we have seen him
using incidents of sacred story, not for their own sake,
nor as mere subjects for pictorial realisation, but as
a cryptic language for fancies all his own, so now he
found a vent for his thought in taking one of these
languid women, and raising her, as Leda or Pomona^

102 THE RENAISSANCE

as Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of sym-
bolical expression.

La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's mas-
terpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought
and work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of
Diirer is comparable to it ; and no crude symbolism dis-
turbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery.
We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its
marble chair, in that circle of fantastic rocks, as in some
faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures
time has chilled it least. 1 As often happens with works
in which invention seems to reach its limi*, there is an
element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In
that intestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession
of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of
such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood
copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with
these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its
germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with
a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all
Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait.
From i childhood we see this image defining itself on the
fabric of his dreams, and but for express historical testi-
mony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady,
embodied and beheld at last. What was the relation-
phip of a living Florentine to this creature of his;
thought? By what strange affinities had the dream and
the person grown up thus apart, and yet so closely to-
gether? Present from the first incorporeally in Leon-
ardo's brain, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio,

1 Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson
in the lips and cheeks, lost for us.

LEONARDO DA VINCI 103

she is found present at last in // Giocondo's house. That
there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is at-
tested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence
of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was
protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and
by renewed labor never really completed, or in four
months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was
projected?

The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the
waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand
years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon
which all "the ends of the world are come/' and the
eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out
from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by
cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and ex-
quisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of
those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of an-
tiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty,
into which the soul with all its maladies has passed!
All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched
and moulded there, in that which they have of power to
refine and make expressive the outward form, the ani-
malism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of
the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imagina-
tive loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she
sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times,
and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a
diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her ;
and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants,
and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and,
as Saint' Anne, the mother of Mary ; and all this has

1041 THE RENAISSANCE

been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and
lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the
changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and th
hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together
ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern
philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as
wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of
thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the
embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern
idea.

During these years at Florence Leonardo's history is
the history of his art; for himself, he is lost in the
bright cloud of it. The outward history begins again in
1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which
he makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The
biographer, putting together the stray jottings of his
manuscripts, may follow him through every day of it,
up the strange tower of Siena, elastic like a bent bow,
down to the seashore at Piombino, each place appearing
as fitfully as in a fever dream.

One other great work was left for him to do, a work
all trace of which soon vanished, The Battle of the
Standard, in which he had Michelangelo for his rival.
The citizens of Florence, desiring to decorate the walls
of the great council-chamber, had offered the work for
competition, and any subject might be chosen from the
Florentine wars of the fifteenth century. Michelangelo
chose for his cartoon an incident of the war with Pisa,
in which the Florentine soldiers, bathing in the Arno,
are surprised by the sound of trumpets, and run to arms.
His design has reached us only in an old engraving,
which helps us less perhaps than our remembrance of

LEONARDO DA VINCI 105

the background of his Holy Family in the Uflizii to im-
agine in what superhuman form, such as might have
beguiled the heart of an earlier world, those figures as-
cended out of the water. Leonardo chose an incident
from the battle of Anghiari, in which two parties of
soldiers fight for a standard. Like Michelangelo's, his
cartoon is lost, and has come to us only in sketches, and
in a fragment of Rubens. Through the accounts given
we may discern some lust of terrible things in it, so that
even the horses tore each other with their teeth. And
yet one fragment of it, in a drawing of his at Florence,
is far different a waving field of lovely armour, the
chased edgings running like lines of sunlight from side
to side. Michelangelo was twenty-seven years old ; Leon-
ardo more than fifty; and Raphael, then nineteen years
of age, visiting Florence for the first time, came and
watched them as they worked.

We catch a glimpse of Leonardo again, at Rome in
1514, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and furnaces,
making strange toys that seemed alive of wax and quick-
silver. The hesitation which had haunted him all
through life, and made him like one under a spell, was
upon him now with double force. No one had ever
carried political indifferentism farther; it had always
been his philosophy to "fly before the storm" ; he is for
the Sforzas, or against them, as the tide of their fortune
turns. Yet now, in the political society of Rome, he
came to be suspected of secret French sympathies. It
paralysed him to find himself among enemies; and he
turned wholly to France, which had long courted him.

France was about to become an Italy more Italian
than Italy itself. Francis the First, like Lewis the

io6 THE RENAISSANCE

Twelfth before him, was attracted by the finesse of
Leonardo's work ; La Gioconda was already in his cabi-
net, and he offered Leonardo the little Chateau de Clou,
with its vineyards and meadows, in the pleasant valley
of the Masse, just outside the walls of the town of Am-
boise, where, especially in the hunting season, the court
then frequently resided. A Monsieur Lyonard, peinteuf
du Roy pour Amboyse so the letter of Francis the
First is headed. It opens a prospect, one of the most
interesting in the history of art, where, in a peculiarly
blent atmosphere, Italian art dies away as a French
exotic.

Two questions remain, after much busy antiquarian-
ism, concerning Leonardo's death the question of the
exact form of his religion, and the question whether
Francis the First was present at the time. They are of
about equally little importance in the estimate of Leon-
ardo's genius. The directions in his will concerning the
thirty masses and the great* candles for the church of
Saint Florentin are things of course, their real purpose
being immediate and practical; and on no theory of re-
ligion could these hurried offices be of much consequence.
We forget them in speculating how one who had been
always so desirous of beauty, but desired it always in
such precise and definite forms, as hands or flowers or
hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and ex-
perienced the last curiosity.

1869.

THE SCHOOL OF GlORGIONE

IT is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard
poetry, music, and painting all the various products
of art as but translations into different languages of one
and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, sup-
plemented by certain technical qualities of color, in paint-
ing ; of sound, in music ; of rhythmical words, in poetry*.
In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it al-
most everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made
a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of
the opposite principle that the sensuous material of
each art brings with it a special phase or quality of
beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an
order of impressions distinct in kind is the beginning of
all true aesthetic criticism. For, as art addresses not
pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the "imagi-
native reason" through the senses, there are differences
of kind in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differ-
ences in kind of the gifts of sense themselves. Each
art, therefore, having its own peculiar and untranslat-
able sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reach-
ing the imagination, its own 3pecial responsibilities to
its material. One of the functions of aesthetic criticism
is to define these limitations; to estimate the degree in
which a given work of art fulfils its responsibilities to
its special material; to note in a picture that true pic-
torial charm, which is neither a mere poetical thought or

107

io8 THE RENAISSANCE

sentiment, on the one hand, nor a mere result of com-
municable technical skill in color or design, on the other ;
to define in a poem that true poetical quality, which is
neither descriptive nor meditative merely, but comes of
an inventive handling of rhythmical language, the ele-
ment of song in the singing; to note in music the musi-
cal charm, that essential music, which presents no
words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable
from the special form in which it is conveyed to us.

To such a philosophy of the variations of the beau-
tiful, Lessing's analysis of the spheres of sculpture and
poetry, in the Lew coon, was an important contribution.
But a true appreciation of these things is possible only
in the light of a whole system of such art-casuistries.
Now painting is the art in the criticism of which this
truth most needs enforcing, for it is in popular judg-
ments on pictures that the false generalisation of all
art into forms of poetry is most prevalent. To suppose
that all is mere technical acquirement in delineation or
touch, working through and addressing itself to the in-
telligence, on the one side, or a merely poetical, or what
may be called literary interest, addressed also to the
pure intelligence on the other : this is the way of most
spectators, and of many critics, who have never caught
sight all the time of that true pictorial quality which lies
between, unique pledge, as it is, of the possession of
the pictorial gift, that inventive or creative handling of
pure line and color, which, as almost always in Dutch
painting, as often also in the works of Titian or Veron-
ese, is quite independent of anything definitely poetical
in the subject it accompanies. It is the drawing the
design projected from that peculiar pictorial tempera-

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 109

ment or constitution, in which, while it may possibly be
ignorant of true anatomical proportions, all things what-
ever, all poetry, all ideas however abstract or obscure,
float up as visible scene or image : it is the coloring that
weaving of light, as of just perceptible gold threads,
through the dress, the flesh, the atmosphere, in Titian's
Lace-girl, that staining of the whole fabric of the thing
with a new, delightful physical quality. This drawing,
then the arabesque traced in the air by Tintoret's flying
figures, by Titian's forest branches; this coloring the
magic conditions of light and hue in the atmosphere of
Titian's Lace-girl, or Rubens's Descent from the Cross:
these essential pictorial qualities must first of all de-
light the sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as
a fragment of Venetian glass; and through this delight
alone become the vehicle of whatever poetry or science
may lie beyond them in the intention of the composer.
In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite
message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and
shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor : is itself,
in truth, a space of such fallen light, caught as the colors
are in an Eastern carpet, but refined upon, and dealt with
more subtly and exquisitely than by nature itself. An$
this primary and essential condition fulfilled, we maj
trace the coming of poetry into painting, by fine grada*
tions upwards : from Japanese fan-painting, for instance,
where we get, first, only abstract color; then, just a
little interfused sense of the poetry of flowers; then,
sometimes, perfect flower-painting; and so, onwards,
until in Titian we have, as his poetry in the Ariadne, so
actually a touch of true childlike humor in the diminu-
tive, quaint figure with its silk gown, which ascends the

no THE RENAISSANCE

temple stairs, in his picture of the Presentation of the
Virgin, at Venice.

But although each art has thus its own specific order
of impressions, and an untranslatable charm, while a
just apprehension of the ultimate differences of the arts
is the beginning of aesthetic criticism ; yet it is noticeable
that, in its special mode of handling its given material,
each art may be observed to pass into the condition of
some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-
streben a partial alienation from its own limitations,
through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the
place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other
new forces.

Thus some of the most delightful music seems to be
always approaching to figure, to pictorial definition.
Architecture, again, though it has its own laws laws
esoteric enough, as the true architect knows only too well
yet sometimes aims at fulfilling the conditions of a
picture, as in the Arena chapel; or of sculpture, as in
the flawless unity of Giotto's tower at Florence; and
often finds a true poetry, as in those strangely twisted
staircases of the chateaux of the country of the Loire,
as if it were intended that among their odd turnings
the actors in a theatrical mode of life might pass each
other unseen; there being a poetry also of memory and
of the mere effect of time, by which architecture often
profits greatly. Thus, again, sculpture aspires out of
the hard limitation of pure form towards color, or its
equivalent; poetry also, in many ways, finding guidance
from the other arts, the analogy between a Greek tragedy
and a work of Greek sculpture, between a sonnet and a
relief, of French poetry generally with the art of en-

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE in

graving, being more than mere figures of speech ; and all
the arts in common aspiring towards the principle of
music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate
art, the object of the great Anders-streben of all art, of
all that is artistic, or partakes of artistic qualities.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of
music. For while in all otTier kinds of art it is possible
to distinguish the matter from the form, and the under-
standing can always make this distinction, yet it is the
constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere
matter of a poem, fof instance, its subject, namely, its
given incidents or situation that the mere matter of a
picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual
topography of a landscape should be nothing without
the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this
mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should
penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art
constantly strives after, and achieves in different de-
grees.

This abstract language becomes clear enough, if we
think of actual examples. In an actual landscape we
see a long, white road, lost suddenly on the hill-verge.
That is the matter of one of the etchings of M. Alphonse
Legros: only, in this etching, it is informed by an in-
dwelling solemnity of expression, seen upon it or half-
seen, within the limits of an exceptional moment, or
caught from his own mood perhaps, but which he main-
tains as the very essence of the thing, throughout his
work. Sometimes a momentary tint of stormy light
may invest a homely or too familiar scene with a char-
acter which might well have been drawn from the deep
places of 'the imagination. Then we might say that

112 THE RENAISSANCE

this particular effect of light, this sudden inweaving of
gold thread through the texture of the haystack, and
the poplars, and the grass, gives the scene artistic quali-
ties, that it is like a picture. And such tricks of circum-
stance are commonest in landscape which has little sali-
ent character of its own; because, in such scenery, all
the material details are so easily absorbed by that in-
forming expression of passing light, and elevated,
throughout their whole extent, to a new and delightful
effect by it. And hence the superiority, for most con-
ditions of the picturesque, of a river-side in France to a
Swiss valley, because, on the French river-side, mere
topography, the simple material, counts for so little, and,
all being very pure, untouched, and tranquil in itself, mere
light and shade have such easy work in modulating it to
one dominant tone. The Venetian landscape, on the
other hand, has in its material conditions much which is
hard, or harshly definite ; but the masters of the Venetian
school have shown themselves little burdened by them.
Of its Alpine background they retain certain abstracted
elements only, of cool color and tranquillising line; and
they use its actual details, the brown windy turrets, the
straw-colored fields, the forest arabesques, but as the
notes of a music which duly accompanies the presence of
their men and women, presenting us with the spirit or
essence only of a certain sort of landscape a country of
the pure reason or half-imaginative memory.

Poetry, again, works with words addressed in the
first instance to the pure intelligence ; and it deals, most
often, with a definite subject or situation. Sometimes it
may find a noble and quite legitimate function in the con-
veyance of moral or political aspiration, as often in the

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 113

poetry of Victor Hugo. In such instances it is easy
enough for the understanding to distinguish between the
matter and the form, however much the matter, the
subject, the element which is addressed to the mere in-
telligence, has been penetrated by the informing, artistic
spirit. But the ideal types of poetry are those in which
this distinction is reduced to its minimum; so that lyrical
poetry, precisely because in it we are least able to detach
the matter from the form, without a deduction of some-
thing from that matter itself, is, at least artistically, the
highest and most complete form of poetry. And the very
perfection of such poetry often appears to depend, in
part, on a certain suppression or vagueness of mere sub-
ject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not
distinctly traceable by the understanding, as in some
of the most imaginative compositions of William Blake,
and often in Shakespeare's songs, as pre-eminently in
that song of Mariana's page in Measure for Measure,
in which the kindling force and poetry of the whole play
seems to pass for a moment into an actual strain of
music.

And this principle holds good of all things that par-
take in any degree of artistic qualities, of the furniture
of our houses, and of dress, for instance, of life itself,
of gesture and speech, and the details of daily inter-
course; these also, for the wise, being susceptible of a
suavity and charm, caught from the way in which they
are done, which gives them a worth in themselves.
Herein, again, lies what is valuable and justly attractive,
in what is called the fashion of a time, which elevates
the trivialities of speech, and manner, and dress, into

THE RENAISSANCE

"ends in themselves," and gives them a mysterious grace
and attractiveness in the doing of them.

Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent
of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure
perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject
or material; the ideal examples of poetry and painting
being those in which the constituent elements of the
composition are so welded together, that the material or
subject no longer strikes the intellect only ; nor the form,
the eye or the ear only; but form and matter, in their
union or identity, present one single effect to the "imagi-
native reason," that complex faculty for which every
thought and feeling is twin-born with its sensible ana-
logue or symbol.

It is the art of music which most completely realises
this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter
and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not
distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the
subject from the expression; they inhere in and com-
pletely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the
condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be
supposed constantly to tend and aspire. In music, then,
rather than in poetry, is to be found the true type or
measure of perfected art. Therefore, although each art
has its incommunicable element, its untranslatable order
of impressions, its unique mode of reaching the "imagi-
native reason," yet the arts may be represented as con-
tinually struggling after the law or principle of music,
to a condition which music alone completely realises ; and
one of the chief functions of aesthetic criticism, dealing
with the products of art, new or old, is to estimate the

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 115

degree in which each of those products approaches, in
this sense, to musical law.

By no school of painters have the necessary limita-
tions of the art of painting been so unerringly though
instinctively apprehended, and the essence of what is
pictorial in a picture so justly conceived, as by the school
of Venice; and the train of thought suggested in what
has been now said is, perhaps, a not unfitting introduc-
tion to a few pages about Giorgione, who, though much
has been taken by recent criticism from what was reputed
to be his work, yet, more entirely than any other painter,
sums up, in what we know of himself and his art, the
spirit of the Venetian school.

The beginnings of Venetian painting link themselves to
the last, stiff, half-barbaric splendors of Byzantine dec-
oration, and are but the introduction into the crust of
marble and gold on the walls of the Duomo of Murano,
or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression.
And throughout the course of its later development, al-
ways subordinate to architectural effect, the work of the
Venetian school never escaped from the influence of its
beginnings. Unassisted, and therefore unperplexed, by
naturalism, religious mysticism, philosophical theories, it
had no Giotto, no Angelico, no Botticelli. Exempt from
the stress of thought and sentiment, which taxed so
severely the resources of the generations of Florentine
artists, those earlier Venetian painters, down to Carpaccio
and the Bellini, seem never for a moment to have been
so much as tempted to lose sight of the scope of their
art in its strictness, or to forget that painting must be
before all things decorative, a thing for the eye, a space

Ii6 THE RENAISSANCE

of color on the wall, only more dexterously blent than
the marking of its precious stone or the chance inter-
change of sun and shade upon it: this, to begin and end
with ; whatever higher matter of thought, or poetry, or
religious reverie might play its part therein, between. At
last, with final mastery of all the technical secrets of his
art, and with somewhat more than "a spark of the di-
vine fire" to his share, comes Giorgione. He is the in-
ventor of genre, of those easily movable pictures which
serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or
historic teaching little groups of real men and women,
amid congruous furniture or landscape morsels of ac-
tual life, conversation or music or play, but refined upon
or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life
from afar. Those spaces of more cunningly blent color,
obediently filling their places, hitherto, in a mere archi-
tectural scheme, Giorgione detaches from the wall. He
frames them by the hands of some skilful carver, so that
people may move them readily and take with them where
they go, as one might a poem in manuscript, or a musical
instrument, to be used, at will, as a means of self-educa-
tion, stimulus or solace, coming like an animated pres-
ence, into one's cabinet, to enrich the air as with some
choice aroma, and, like persons, live with us, for a day or
a lifetime. Of all art such as this, art which has played
so large a part in men's culture since that time, Giorgione
is the initiator. Yet in him too that old Venetian clear-
ness or justice, in the apprehension of the essential limi-
tations of the pictorial art, is still undisturbed. While
he interfuses his painted work with a high-strung sort
of poetry, caught directly from a singularly rich and
high-strung sort of life, yet in his selection of subject,

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE ir/

or phase of subject, in the subordination of mere subject
to pictorial design, to the main purpose of a picture, he
is typical of that aspiration of all the arts towards music,
which I have endeavored to explain, towards the per-
fect identification of matter and form.

Born so near to Titian, though a little before him,
that these two companion pupils of the aged Giovanni
Bellini may almost be called contemporaries, Giorgione
stands to Titian in something like the relationship of
Sordello to Dante, in Browning's poem. Titian, when
he leaves Bellini, becomes, in turn, the pupil of Giorgione.
He lives in constant labor more than sixty years after
Giorgione is in his grave; and with such fruit, that
hardly one of the greater towns of Europe is without
some fragment of his work. But the slightly older man,
with his so limited actual product (what remains to us
of it seeming, when narrowly explained, to reduce itself
to almost one picture, like Sordello's one fragment of
lovely verse), yet expresses, in elementary motive and
principle, that spirit itself the final acquisition of alt
the long endeavors of Venetian art which Titian
spreads over his whole life's activity.

And, as we might expect, something fabulous and il-
lusive has always mingled itself in the brilliancy of
Giorgione's fame. The exact relationship to him of
many works drawings, portraits, painted idylls often
fascinating enough, which in various collections went by
his name, was from the first uncertain. Still, six or
eight famous pictures at Dresden, Florence and the
Louvre, were with no doubt attributed to him, and in
these, if anywhere, something of the splendor of the
old Venetian humanity seemed to have been preserved.

Ii8 THE RENAISSANCE

But of those six or eight famous pictures it is now known
that only one is certainly from Giorgione's hand. The ac-
complished science of the subject has come at last, and,
as in other instances, has not made the past more real for
us, but assured us only that we possess less of it than we
seemed to possess. Much of the work on which Giorgi-
one's immediate fame depended, work done for instan-
taneous effect, in all probability passed away almost with-
in his own age, like the frescoes on the fagade of the
fondaco dei Tedeschi at Venice, some crimson traces of
which, however, still give a strange additional touch of
splendor to the scene of the Rialto. And then there is a
barrier or borderland, a period about the middle of the
sixteenth century, in passing through which the tradition
miscarries, and the true outlines of Giorgione's work and
person are obscured. It became fashionable for wealthy
lovers of art, with no critical standard of authenticity,
to collect so-called works of Giorgione, and a multitude
of imitations came into circulation. And now, in the
"new Vasari," 1 the great traditional reputation, woven
with so profuse demand on men's admiration, has been
scrutinized thread by thread; and what remains of the
most vivid and stimulating of Venetian masters, a live
flame, as it seemed, in those old shadowy times, has been
reduced almost to a name by his most recent critics.

Yet enough remains to explain why the legend grew
up above the name, why the name attached itself, in
many instances, to the bravest work of other men. The
Concert in the Pitti Palace, in which a monk, with cowl
and tonsure, touches the keys of a harpsichord, while a

1 Crowe and Cavalcaselle : History of Painting in North
Italy.

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 119

clerk, placed behind him, grasps the handle of the viol,
and a third, with cap and plume, seems to wait upon the
true interval for beginning to sing, is undoubtedly
Giorgione's. The outline of the lifted finger, the trace
of the plume, the very threads of the fine linen, which
fasten themselves on the memory, in the moment before
they are lost altogether in that calm unearthly glow, the
skill which has caught the waves of wandering sound,
and fixed them for ever on the lips and hands these are
indeed the master's own ; and the criticism which, while
dismissing so much hitherto believed to be Giorgione's,
has established the claims of this one picture, has left it
among the most precious things in the world of art.

It is noticeable that the "distinction" of this Concert,
its sustained evenness of perfection, alike in design, in
execution, and in choice of personal type, becomes for
the "new Vasari" the standard of Giorgione's genuine
work. Finding here sufficient to explain his influence,
and the true seal of mastery, its authors assign to Pelle-
grino da San Daniele the Holy Family in the Louvre, in
consideration of certain points where it comes short of
this standard. Such shortcoming, however, will hardly
diminish the spectator's enjoyment of a singular charm
of liquid air, with which the whole picture seems in-
stinct, filling the eyes and lips, the very garments, of its
sacred personages, with some wind-searched brightness
and energy ; of which fine air the blue peak, clearly de-
fined in the distance, is, as it were, the visible pledge.
Similarly, another favorite picture in the Louvre, the sub-
ject of a delightful sonnet by a poet x whose own painted
work often comes to mind as one ponders over these
1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

120 THE RENAISSANCE

precious things the Fete Champetre, is assigned to an
imitator of Sebastian del Piombo; and the Tempest, in
the Academy at Venice, to Paris Bordone, or perhaps
to "some advanced craftsman of the sixteenth century/'
From the gallery at Dresden, the Knight embracing a
Lady, where the knight's broken gauntlets seem to mark
some well-known pause in a story we would willingly
hear the rest of, is conceded to "a Brescian hand," and
Jacob meeting Rachel to a pupil of Palma. And then,
whatever their charm, we are called on to give up the
Ordeal, and the Finding of Moses with its jewel-like
pools of water, perhaps to Bellini.

Nor has the criticism, which thus so freely diminishes
the number of his authentic works, added anything im-
portant to the well-known outline of the life and per-
sonality of the man : only, it has fixed one or two dates,
one or two circumstances, a little more exactly. Giorgi-
one was born before the year 1477, and spent his child-
hood at Castelfranco, where the last crags of the Vene-
tian Alps break down romantically, with something of
parklike grace, to the plain. A natural child of the
family of the Barbarelli by a peasant-girl of Vedelago,
he finds his way early into the circle of notable persons
people of courtesy. He is initiated into those differences
of personal type, manner, and even of dress, which are
best understood there that "distinction" of the Concert
of the Pitti Palace. Not far from his home lives Cather-
ine of Cornara, formerly Queen of Cyprus ; and, up in
the towers which still remain, Tuzio Costanzo, the fa-
mous condottiere a picturesque remnant of medieval
manners, amid a civilisation rapidly changing. Giorgi-
ane paints their portraits ; and when Tuzio's son, Matteo,

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 121

dies in early youth, adorns in his memory a chapel ifl
the church of Castelfranco, painting on this occasion,
perhaps, the altar-piece, foremost among his authentic
works, still to be seen there, with the figure of the war-
rior-saint, Liberale, of which the original little study
in oil, with the delicately gleaming, silver-grey armour,
is one of the greater treasures of the National Gallery.
In that figure, as in some other knightly personages at-
tributed to him, people have supposed the likeness of
the painter's own presumably gracious presence. Thith-
er, at last, he is himself brought home from Venice, early
dead, but celebrated. It happened, about his thirty-
fourth year, that in one of those parties at which he
entertained his friends with music, he met a certain lady
of whom he became greatly enamoured, and "they re-
joiced greatly," says Vasari, "the one and the other, in
their loves." And two quite different legends concern-
ing it agree in this, that it was through this lady he came
by his death; Ridolfi relating that, being robbed of
her by one of his pupils, he died of grief at the double
treason; Vasari, that she being secretly stricken of the
plague, and he making his visits to her as usual, Giorgi-
one took the sickness from her mortally, along with her
kisses, and so briefly departed.

But, although the number of Giorgione's extant works
has been thus limited by recent criticism, all is not done
when the real and the traditional elements in what con-
cerns him have been discriminated ; for, in what is con-
nected with a great name, much that is not real is often
very stimulating. For the aesthetic philosopher, there-
fore, over and above the real Giorgione and his authentic
extant works, there remains the Giorgione 'sque also an

122 THE RENAISSANCE

influence, a spirit or type in art, active in men so differ-
ent as those to whom many of his supposed works are
really assignable. A veritable school, in fact, grew to-
gether out of all those fascinating works rightly or
wrongly attributed to him; out of many copies from, or
variations on him, by unknown or uncertain workmen,
whose drawings and designs were, for various reasons,
prized as his ; out of the immediate impression he made
upon his contemporaries, and with which he continued
in men's minds; out of many traditions of subject and
treatment, which really descend from him to our own
time, and by retracing which we fill out the original
image. Giorgione thus becomes a sort of impersona-
tion of Venice itself, its projected reflex or ideal, all
that was intense or desirable in it crystallising about the
memory of this wonderful young man.

And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the char-
acteristics of this School of Giorgione, as we may call
it, which, for most of us, notwithstanding all that nega-
tive criticism of the "new Vasari," will still identify
itself with those famous pictures at Florence, at Dres-
den and Paris. A certain artistic ideal is there defined
for us the conception of a peculiar aim and procedure
in art, which we may understand as the Giorgionesque,
wherever we find it, whether in Venetian work generally,
or in work of our own time. Of this the Concert, that
undoubted work of Giorgione in the Pitti Palace, is the
typical instance, and a pledge authenticating the connex-
ion of the school, and the spirit of the school, with the
master.

I have spoken of a certain interpenetration of the

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 123

matter or subject of a work of art with the form of it,
a condition realised absolutely only in music, as the con-
dition to which every form of art is perpetually aspir-
ing. In the art of painting, the attainment of this ideal
condition, this perfect interpenetration of the subject
with the elements of colour and design, depends, of
course, in great measure, on dexterous choice of that
subject, or phase of subject; and such choice is one of
the secrets of Giorgione's school. It is the school of
genre, and employs itself mainly with "painted idylls,"
but, in the production of this pictorial poetry, exercises
a wonderful tact in the selecting of such matter as lends
itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to com-
plete expression by drawing and colour. For although its
productions are painted poems, they belong to a sort of
poetry which tells itself without an articulated story.
The master is pre-eminent for the resolution, the ease
and quickness, with which he reproduces instantaneous
motion the lacing-on of armour, with the head bent back
so stately the fainting lady the embrace, rapid as the
kiss, caught with death itself from dying lips some mo-
mentary conjunction of mirrors and polished armour and
still water, by which all the sides of a solid image are
exhibited at once, solving that casuistical question
whether painting can present an object as completely as
sculpture. The sudden act, the rapid transition of
thought, the passing expression this he arrests with that
vivacity which Vasari has attributed to him, il fuoco
Giorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is part of the
ideality of the highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it
presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and
animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, per-

124 THE RENAISSANCE

haps some brief and wholly concrete moment into
tvhich, however, all the motives, all the interests and
effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and
which seem to absorb past and future in an intense con-
sciousness of the present. Such ideal instants the school
of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that
feverish, tumultuously coloured world of the old citizens
of Venice exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested
thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of ex-
istence, and which are like some consummate extract or
quintessence of life.

It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that
all art like this is really aspiring; and, in the school of
Giorgione, the perfect moments of music itself, the mak-
ing or hearing of music, song or its accompaniment, are
themselves prominent as subjects. On that back-ground
of the silence of Venice, so impressive to the modern
visitor, the world of Italian music was then forming. In
choice of subject, as in all besides, the Concert of the
Pitti Palace is typical of everything that Giorgione, him-
self an admirable musician, touched with his influence.
In sketch or finished picture, in various collections, we
may follow it through many intricate variations men
fainting at music; music at the pool-side while people
fish, or mingled with the sound of the pitcher in the
well, or heard across running water, or among the flocks ;
the tuning of instruments ; people with intent faces, as if
listening, like those described by Plato in an ingenious
passage of the Republic, to detect the smallest interval
of musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air, or
feeling for music in thought on a stringless instrument,
ear and finger refining themselves infinitely, in the ap*

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 125

petite for sweet sound; a momentary touch of an in-
strument in the twilight, as one passes through some
unfamiliar room, in a chance company.

In these then, the favourite incidents of Giorgione's
school, music or the musical intervals in our existence,
life itself is conceived as a sort of listening listening
to music, to the reading of Bandello's novels, to the
sound of water, to time as it flies. Often such moments
are really our moments of play, and we are surprised at
the unexpected blessedness of what may seem our least
important part of time; not merely because play is in
many instances that to which people really apply their
own best powers, but also because at such times, the
stress of our servile, everyday attentiveness being re-
laxed, the happier powers in things without are per-
mitted free passage, and have their way with us. And
so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes often to
the play which is like music; to those masques in which
men avowedly do but play at real life, like children
"dressing up," disguised in the strange old Italian
dresses, particoloured, or fantastic with embroidery and
furs, of which the master was so curious a designer, and
which, above all the spotless white linen at wrist and
throat, he painted so dexterously.

But when people are happy in this thirsty land water
will not be far off; and in the school of Giorgione, the
presence of water the well, or marble-rimmed pool,
the drawing or pouring of water, as the woman pours
it from a pitcher with her jewelled hand in the Fete
Champetre, listening, perhaps, to the cool sound as it
falls, blent with the music of the pipes is as charac-
teristic, and 'almost as suggestive, as that of music itself.

126 THE RENAISSANCE

And the landscape feels and is glad of it also a land-
scape full of clearness, of the effects of water, of fresh
rain newly passed through the air, and collected into the
grassy channels. The air, moreover, in the school of
Giorgione, seems as vivid as the people who breathe
it, and literally empyrean, all impurities being burnt out
of it, and no taint, no floating particle of anything but
its own proper elements allowed to subsist within it.

Its scenery is such as in England we call "park scen-
ery/' with some elusive refinement felt about the rustic
buildings, the choice grass, the grouped trees, the undula-
tions deftly economised for graceful effect. Only, in
Italy all natural things are as it were woven through and
through the gold thread, even the cypress revealing it
among the folds of its blackness. And it is with gold
dust, or gold thread, that these Venetian painters seem
to work, spinning its fine filaments, through the solemn
human flesh, away into the white plastered walls of the
thatched huts. The harsher details of the mountains re j
cede to a harmonious distance, the one peak of rich blue
above the horizon remaining but as the sensible war-
rant of that due coolness which is all we need ask here
of the Alps, with their dark rains and streams. Yet what
real, airy space, as the eye passes from level to level,
through the long-drawn valley in which Jacob embraces
Rachel among the flocks! Nowhere is there a truer
instance of that balance, that modulated unison of land-
scape and persons of the human image and its acces-
sories already noticed as characteristic of the Vene-
tian school, so that, in it, neither personage nor scenery
is ever a mere pretext for the other.

Something like this seems to me to be the vraie verit6

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 127

about Giorgione, if I may adopt a serviceable expres-
sion, by which the French recognise those more liberal
and durable impressions which, in respect of any really
considerable person or subject, anything that has at
all intricately occupied men's attention, lie beyond, and
must supplement, the narrower range of the strictly
ascertained facts about it. In this, Giorgione is but an
illustration of a valuable general caution we may abide
by in all criticism. As regards Giorgione himself, we
have indeed to take note of all those negotiations and
exceptions, by which, at first sight, a "'new Vasari"
seems merely to have confused our apprehension of
a delightful object, to have explained away in our
inheritance from past time what seemed of high value
there. Yet it is not with a full understanding even of
those exceptions that one can leave off just at this point.
Properly qualified, such exceptions are but a salt of
genuineness in our knowledge; and beyond all those
strictly ascertained facts, we must take note of that
indirect influence by which one like Giorgione, for
instance, enlarges his permanent efficacy and really makes
himself felt in our culture. In a just impression of
that, is the essential truth, the vraie verite, concerning
him.

1877.

JOACHIM DU BELLAY

IN the middle of the sixteenth century, when the
spirit of the Renaissance was everywhere, and people
had begun to look back with distaste on the works of
the middle age, the old Gothic manner had still one
chance more, in borrowing something from the rival
which was about to supplant it. In this way there was
produced, chiefly in France, a new and peculiar phase
of taste with qualities and a charm of its own, blending
the somewhat attenuated grace of Italian ornament with
the general outlines of Northern design. It created the
Chateau de Gaillon, as you may still see it in the delicate
engravings of Israel Silvestre a Gothic donjon* veiled
faintly by a surface of dainty Italian traceries Chenon-
ceaux, Blois, Chambord, and the church of Brou. In
painting, there came from Italy workmen like Maitre
Roux and the masters of the school of Fontainebleau,
to have their later Italian voluptuousness attempered by
the naive and silvery qualities of the native style ; and
it was characteristic of these painters that they were
most successful in painting on glass, an art so essentially
medieval. Taking it up where the middle age had left
it, they found their whole work among the last subtleties
of colour and line; and keeping within the true limits
of their material, they got quite a new order of effects
from it, and felt their way to refinements on colour never
dreamed of by those older workmen, the glass-painters

128

JOACHIM DU BELLAY 129

of Chartres or le Mans. What is called the Renais-
sance in France is thus not so much the introduction
of a wholly new taste ready-made from Italy, but
rather the finest and subtlest phase of the middle age
itself, its last fleeting splendour and temperate Saint
Martin's summer. In poetry, the Gothic spirit in France
had produced a thousand songs; so in the Renaissance,
French poetry, too, did but borrow something to blend
with a native growth, and the poems of Ronsard, with
their ingenuity, their delicately figured surfaces, their
slightness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are the
correlative of the traceries of the house of Jacques Cceur
at Bourges, or the Maison de Justice at Rouen.

There was indeed something in the native French taste
naturally akin to that Italian finesse. The characteristic
of French work had always been a certain nicety, a
remarkable daintiness of hand, une nettete remarquable
d 'execution. In the paintings of Frangois Clouet, for
example, or rather oi the Clouets for there was a
whole family of them painters remarkable for their
resistance to Italian influences, there is a silveriness of
colour and a clearness of expression which distinguish
them very definitely from their Flemish neighbours,
Hemling or the Van Eycks. And this nicety is not
less characteristic of old French poetry. A light, aerial
delicacy, a simple elegance une nettete remarquable
d' execution: these are essential characteristics alike of
Villon's poetry, and of the Hours of Anne of Brittany.
They are characteristic, too, of a hundred French Gothic
carvings and traceries. Alike in the old Gothic cathe-
drals, and in their counterpart, the old Gothic chansons
de gest'e, the rough and ponderous mass becomes as if

I 3 o THE RENAISSANCE

by passing for a moment into happier conditions, or
through a more gracious stratum of air, graceful and
refined, like the carved ferneries on the granite church
at Folgoat, or the lines which describe the fair priestly
hands of Archbishop Turpin, in the song of Roland;
although below both alike there is a fund of mere Gothic
strength, or heaviness. 1

Now, Villon's songs and Clouet's painting are like
these. It is the higher touch making itself felt here
and there, betraying itself, like nobler blood in a lower
stock, by a fine line or gesture or expression, the turn
of a wrist, the tapering of a finger. In Ronsard's time
that rougher element seemed likely to predominate. No
one can turn over the pages of Rabelais without feeling
how much need there was of softening, of castigation.
To effect this softening is the object of the revolution
in poetry which is connected with Ronsard's name.
Casting about for the means of thus refining upon and
saving the character of French literature, he accepted that
influx of Renaissance taste, which, leaving the buildings,
the language, the art, the poetry of France, at bottom,
what they were, old French Gothic still, gilds their sur-
faces with a strang'e, delightful, foreign aspect passing
over all that Northern land, in itself neither deeper nor
more permanent than a chance effect of light. He
reinforces, he doubles the French daintiness by Italian
finesse. Thereupon, nearly all the force and all the seri-
ousness of French work disappear; only the elegance,
the aerial touch, the perfect manner remain. But this

1 The purely artistic aspects of this subj ect have been inter-
preted, in a work of great taste and learning, by Mrs. Mark
Pattison: The Renaissance of Art in France.

JOACHIM DU BELLAY 131

elegance, this manner, this daintiness of execution are
consummate, and have an unmistakable aesthetic value.
So the old French chanson, which, like the old northern
Gothic ornament, though it sometimes refined itself into
a sort of weird elegance, was often, in its essence, some-
thing rude and formless, became in the hands of Ronsard
a Pindaric ode. He gave it structure, a sustained system,
strophe and antistrophe, and taught it a changefulness
and variety of metre which keep the curiosity always
excited, so that the very aspect of it, as it lies written
on the page, carries the eye lightly onwards, and of
which this is a good instance :

Avril, la grace, et le ris

De Cypris,

Le flair et la douce haleine;
Avril, le parfum des dieux,

Qui, des deux,
Sentent I'odeur de la plaine;

C'est toy, courtois et gentil,

Qui, d'exil

Retire ces passageres,
Ces arondelles qui vont,

Et qui sont
Du printemps les messageres.

That is not by Ronsard, but by Remy Belleau, for
Ronsard soon came to have a school. Six other poets
threw in their lot with him in his literary revolution,
this Remy Belleau, Antoine de Baif, Pontus de Tyard,
fitienne Jodelle, Jean Daurat, and lastly Joachim du
Bellay; and with that strange love of emblems which
is characteristic of the time, which covered all the works
of Francis the First with the salamander, and all the

' 132 THE RENAISSANCE

works of Henry the Second with the double crescent,
and all the work of Anne of Brittany with the knotted
cord, they called themselves the Pleiad; seven in all,
although, as happens with the celestial Pleiad, if you
scrutinise this constellation of poets more carefully you
may find there a great number of minor stars.

The first note of this literary revolution was struck
by Joachim du Bellay in a little tract written at the
early age of twenty-four, which coming to us through
three centuries seems of yesterday, so full is it of those
delicate critical distinctions which are sometimes sup-
posed peculiar to modern writers. The piece has for its
title La Deffense tt Illustration de la Langue Frangoyse;
and its problem is how to illustrate or ennoble the French
language, to give it lustre. We are accustomed to speak
of the varied critical and creative movement of the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries as the Renaissance, and
because we have a single name for it we may sometimes
fancy that there was more unity in the thing itself than
there really was. Even the Reformation, that other
great movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
had far less unity, far less of combined action, than
is at first sight supposed; and the Renaissance was
infinitely less united, less conscious of combined action,
than the Reformation. But if anywhere the Renaissance
became conscious, as a German philosopher might say,
if ever it was understood as a systematic movement by
those who took part in it, it is in this little book of
Joachim du Bellay's, which it is impossible to read with-
out feeling the excitement, the animation, of change, of
discovery. "It is a remarkable fact," says M. Sainte-
Beuve, "and an inversion of what is true of other Ian-

JOACHIM DU BELLAY 133

guages, that, in French, prose has always had the pre-
cedence over poetry." Du Bellay's prose is perfectly
transparent, flexible, and chaste. In many ways it is a
more characteristic example of the culture of the Pleiad
than any of its verse; and those who love the whole
movement of which the Pleiad is a part* for a weird
foreign grace in it, and may be looking about for a
true specimen of it, cannot have a better than Joachim
du Bellay and this little treatise of his.

Du Bellay's object is to adjust the existing French
culture to the rediscovered classical culture ; and in dis-
cussing this problem, and developing the theories of the
Pleiad, he has lighted upon many principles of perma-
nent truth and applicability. There were some who
despaired of the French language altogether, who thought
it naturally incapable of the fulness and elegance of
Greek and Latin cette elegance et copie qui est en la
tongue Greque et Romaine that science could be ade-
quately discussed, and poetry nobly written, only in the
dead languages. "Those who speak thus," says Du
Bellay, "make me think of the relics which one may
only see through a little pane of glass, and must not
touch with one's hands. That is what these people do
with all branches of culture, which they keep shut up
in Greek and Latin books, not permitting one to see
them otherwise, or transport them out of dead words into
those which are alive, and wing their way daily through
the mouths of men." "Languages," he says again, "are
not born like plants and trees, some naturally feeble and
sickly, others healthy and strong and apter to bear
the weight of men's conceptions, but all their virtue is
generated in the world of choice and men's freewill

134 THE RENAISSANCE

concerning them. Therefore, I cannot blame too strongly
the rashness of some of our countrymen, who being
anything rather than Greeks or Latins, depreciate and
reject with more than stoical disdain everything written
in French ; nor can I express my surprise at the odd
opinion of some learned men who think that our vulgar
tongue is wholly incapable of erudition and good litera-
ture."

It was an age of translations. Du Bellay himself
translated two books of the Mneid, and other poetry,
old and new, and there were some who thought that the
translation of the classical literature was the true means
T>f ennobling the French language: strangers are ever
favourites with us nous favorisons toujours les etran-
gers. Du Bellay moderates their expectations. "I do
not believe that one can learn the right use of them"
he is speaking of figures and ornament in language
"from translations, because it is impossible to reproduce
them with the same grace with which the original author
used them. For each language has I know not what
peculiarity of its own; and if you force yourself to
express the naturalness (le naif) of this in another lan-
guage, observing the law of translation, not to expatiate
beyond the limits of the author himself, your words will
be constrained, cold and ungraceful." Then he fixes
the test of all good translation: "To prove this, read
me Demosthenes and Homer in Latin, Cicero and Virgil
in French, and see whether they produce in you the same
affections which you experience in reading those authors
in the original."

In this effort to ennoble the French language, to give
it grace, number, perfection, and as painters do to their

JOACHIM DU BELLAY 13^

pictures, that last, so desirable, touch cette dernibre
main que nous desirous what Du Bellay is really plead-
ing for is his mother-tongue, the language, that is, in
which one will have the, utmost degree of what is mov-
ing and passionate. He recognised of what force the
music and dignity of languages are, how they enter into
the inmost part of things; and in pleading for the cul-
tivation of the French- language, he is pleading for no
merely scholastic interest, but for freedom, impulse,
reality, not in literature only, but in daily communion of
speech. After all, it was impossible to have this impulse
in Greek and Latin, dead languages shut up in books
as in reliquaries peris et mises en reliquaires de livres.
By aid of this starveling stock pauvre plante et vergette
of the French language, he must speak delicately,
movingly, if he is ever to speak so at all : that, or none,
must be for him the medium of what he calls, in one
of his great phrases, le discours fatal des choses mon-
daines that discourse about affairs which decide men's
fates. And it is his patriotism not to despair of it; he
sees it already perfect in all elegance and beauty of
words purfait en toute elegance et venuste de paroles.
Du Bellay was born in the disastrous year 1525, the
year of the battle of Pavia, and the captivity of Francis
the First. His parents died early, and to him, as the
younger son, his mother's little estate, ce petit Lire, the
beloved place of his birth, descended. He was brought
up by a brother only a little older than himself ; and left
to themselves, the two boys passed their lives in day^
dreams of military glory. Their education was neglected*
"The time of my youth/' says Du Bellay, "was lost,
Hke the flower which no shower waters, and no hand

136 THE RENAISSANCE

cultivates." He was just twenty years old when the
elder brother died, leaving Joachim to be the guardian
of his child. It was with regret, with a shrinking sense
of incapacity, that he took upon him the burden of this
responsibility. Hitherto he had looked forward to the
profession of a soldier, hereditary in his family. But at
this time a sickness attacked him which brought him
cruel sufferings, and seemed likely to be mortal. It was
then for the first time that he read the Greek and Latin
poets. These studies came too late to make him what
he so much desired to be, a trifler in Greek and Latin
verse, like so many others of his time now forgotten;
instead, they made him a lover of his own homely native
tongue, that poor starveling stock of the French language.
It was through this fortunate shortcoming in his educa-
tion that he became national and modern ; and he learned
afterwards to look back on that wild garden of his youth
with only a half regret. A certain Cardinal du Bellay
was the successful member of the family, a man often
employed in high official business. To him the thoughts
of Joachim turned when it became necessary to choose a
profession, and in 1552 he accompanied the Cardinal to
Rome. He remained there nearly five years, burdened
with the weight of 'affairs, and languishing with home-
sickness. Yet it was under these circumstances that his
genius yielded its best fruits. From Rome, so full of
pleasurable sensation for men of an imaginative tem-
perament such as his, with all the curiosities of the
Renaissance still fresh in it, his thoughts went back
painfully, longingly, to the country of the Loire, with
its wide expanse of waving corn, its homely pointed
roofs of grey slate, and its far-off scent of the sea. He

JOACHIM DU BELLAY 137

reached home at last, but only to die there, quite sud-
denly, one wintry day, at the early age of thirty-five.

Much of Du Bellay's poetry illustrates rather the age
and school to which he belonged than his own temper
and genius. As with the writings of Ronsard and the
other poets of the Pleiad, its interest depends not so
much on the impress of individual genius upon it, as on
the circumstance that it was once poetry a la mode,
that it is part of the manner of a time a time which
made much of manner, and carried it to a high degree
of perfection. It is one of the decorations of an age
which threw a large part of its energy into the work
of decoration. We feel a pensive pleasure in gazing 1
on these faded adornments, and observing how a group
of actual men and women pleased themselves long ago.
Ronsard's poems are a kind of epitome of his age. ' Of
one side of that age, it is true, of the strenuous, the
progressive, the serious movement, which was then going
on, there is little ; but of the catholic side, the losing side,
the forlorn hope, hardly a figure is absent. The Queen
of Scots, at whose desire Ronsard published his odes,
reading him in her northern prison, felt that he was
bringing back to her the true flavour of her early days
in the court of Catherine at the Louvre, with its exotic
Italian gaieties. Those who disliked that poetry, dis-
liked it because they found that age itself distasteful.
The poetry of Malherbe came, with its sustained style
and weighty sentiment, but with nothing that set people
singing ; and the lovers of such poetry saw in the poetry
of the Pleiad only the latest trumpery of the middle age.
But the time arrived when the school of Malherbe also
had 'had its day; and the Romanticists, who in their

138 THE RENAISSANCE

eagerness for excitement, for strange music and imagery,
went back to the works of the middle age, accepted the
Pleiad, too, with the rest; and in that new middle age
which their genius has evoked, the poetry of the Pleiad
has found its place. At first, with Malherbe, you may
think it, like the architecture, the whole mode of life, the
very dresses of that time, fantastic, faded, rococo. But
if you look long enough to understand it, to conceive its
sentiment, you will find that those wanton lines have a
spirit guiding their caprices. For there is style there;
one temper has shaped the whole; and everything that
has style, that has been done as no other man or age
could have done it, as it could never, for all our trying,
be done again, has its true value and interest. Let us
dwell upon it for a moment, and try to gather from it that
special flower, ce fteur particulier, which Ronsard him-
self tells us every garden has.

It is poetry not for the people, but for a confined
circle, for courtiers, great lords and erudite persons,
people who desire to be humoured, to gratify a certain
refined voluptuousness they have in them. Ronsard loves,
or dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type of
beauty, le petite pucelle Angevine, with golden hair and
dark eyes. But he has the ambition not only of being
a courtier and a lover, but a great scholar also; he is
anxious about orthography, about the letter e Grecque,
the true spelling of Latin names in French writing, and
the restoration of the letter i to its primitive liberty
del' i voyelle en sa premiere liberte. His poetry is full
of quaint, remote learning. He is just a little pedantic,
true always to his own express judgment, that to be
natural is not enough for one who in poetry desires

JOACHIM DU BELLAY 13%,

to produce work worthy of immortality. And there-
withal a certain number of Greek words, which charmed
Ronsard and his circle by their gaiety and daintiness,
and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept
into the French language; as there were other strange
words which the poets of the Pleiad forged for them-
selves, and which had only an ephemeral existence.

With this was united the desire to taste a more
exquisite and various music than that of the old French
verse, or of the classical poets. The music of the
measured, scanned verse of Latin and 'Greek poetry is
one thing; the music of the rhymed, unscanned verse of
Villon and the old French poets, la poesie chantee, is
another. To combine these two kinds of music in a new
school of French poetry, to make verse which should scan
and rhyme as well, to search out and harmonise the
measure of every syllable, and unite it to the swift, flit^
ting, swallow-like motion of rhyme, to penetrate their
poetry with a double music this was the ambition of
the Pleiad. They are insatiable of music, they cannot
have enough of it; they desire a music of greater
compass perhaps than words can possibly yield, to drain
out the last drops of sweetness which a certain note or
accent contains.

It was Goudimel, the serious and protestant Goudimel,
who set Ronsard's songs to music; but except in this
eagerness for music the poets of the Pleiad seem never
quite in earnest. The old Greek and Roman mythology,
which the great Italians had found a motive so weighty
and severe, becomes with them a mere toy. That "Lorof
of terrible aspect/' Amor, has become Love the boy, o*
the babe. They are full of fine railleries; they delight

140 THE RENAISSANCE

in diminutives, ondelette, fontelette, doucelette, Cassan-
drette. Their loves are only half real, a vain effort
to prolong the imaginative loves of the middle age
beyond their natural lifetime. They write love-poems
for hire. Like that party of people who tell the tales
in Boccaccio's Decameron, they form a circle which in
an age of great troubles, losses, anxieties, can amuse
itself with art, poetry, intrigue. But they amuse
themselves with wonderful elegance. And sometimes
their gaiety becomes satiric, for, as they play, real
passions insinuate themselves, and at least the reality of
death. Their dejection at the thought of leaving this
fair abode of our common daylight le beau sejour du
comnvun jour is expressed by them with almost weari-
some reiteration. But with this sentiment, too, they are
able to trifle. The imagery of death serves for delicate
ornament, and they weave into the airy nothingness of
their verses their trite reflections on the vanity of life.
Just so the grotesque details of the charnel-house nest
themselves, together with birds and flowers and the
fancies of the pagan mythology, in the traceries of the
architecture of that time, which wantons in its graceful
arabesques with the images of old age and death.

Ronsard became deaf at sixteen; and it was this
circumstance which finally determined him to be a man
of letters instead of a diplomatist, significantly, one
might fancy, of a certain premature agedness, and of
the tranquil, temperate sweetness appropriate to that, in
the school of poetry which he founded. Its charm is
that of a thing not vigorous or original, but full of the
grace which comes of long study and reiterated refine-
ments, and many steps repeated, and many angles worn

JOACHIM DU BELLAY 141

down, with an exquisite faintness, une fadeur exquise,
a certain tenuity and caducity, as for those who "can bear
nothing vehement or strong; for princes weary of love,
like Francis the First, or of pleasure, like Henry the
Third, or of action, like Henry the Fourth. Its merits
are those of the old, grace and finish, perfect in minute
detail. For these people are a little jaded, and have
a constant desire for a subdued and delicate excite-
ment, to warm their creeping fancy a little. They love
a constant change of rhyme in poetry, and in their houses
that strange, fantastic interweaving of thin, reed-like
lines, which are a kind of rhetoric in architecture.

But the poetry of the Pleiad is true not only to the
physiognomy of its age, but also to its country ce pays
du Vendomois the names and scenery of which so
often recur in it: the great Loire, with its Jong spaces
of white sand ; the little river Loir ; the heathy, upland
country, with its scattered pools of water and waste
roadsides, and retired manors, with their crazy old feudal
defences half fallen into decay; La Beauce, where the
vast rolling fields seem to anticipate the great western
sea itself. It is full of the traits of that country. We
see Du Bellay and Ronsard gardening, or hunting with
their dogs, or watch the pastimes of a rainy day ; and
with all this is connected a domesticity, a homeliness
and simple goodness, by which the Northern country
gains upon the South. They have the love of the aged
for warmth, and understand the poetry of winter ; for
they are not far from the Atlantic, and the west wind
which comes up from it, turning the poplars white, spares
not this new Italy in France. So the fireside often
appears, with the pleasures of the frosty season, about

142 THE RENAISSANCE

the vast emblazoned chimneys of the time, and with a
bonhomie as of little children, or old people.

It is in Du Bellay's Olive, a collection of sonnets in
praise of a half-imaginary lady, Sonnetz a la louange
d'Olive, that these characteristics are most abundant.
Here is a perfectly crystallised example :

D' amour, de grace, et de haulte valeur

Les feux divins estoient ceinctz et les cieulx
S f estoient vestuz d'un manteau precieux
A raiz ardens de diverse couleur:

Tout estoit plein de beaute, de bonheur,
La mer tranquille, et le vent gracieulx,
Quand celle la nasquit en ces bas lieux
Qui a pille du monde tout I'honneur.

Ell' prist son teint des beux lyz blanchissans,
Son chef de l'or, ses deux levres des roses,
Et du soleil ses yeux resplandissans:

Le del usant de liberalite,

Mist en V esprit ses sentences encloses,
Son nom des Dieux prist I'immortalite.

That he is thus a characteristic specimen of the poetical
taste of that age, is indeed Du Bellay's chief interest. But;
if his work is to have the highest sort of interest, if it
is to do something more than satisfy curiosity, if it is
to have an aesthetic as distinct from an historical value,
it is not enough for a poet to have been the true child of
his age, to have conformed to its aesthetic conditions,
and by so conforming to have charmed and stimulated
that age ; it is necessary that there should be perceptible
in his work something individual, inventive, unique, the
impress there of the writer's own temper and personality.
This impress M. Sainte-Beuve thought he found in the
Antiquites de Rome, and the Regrets, which he ranks

JOACHIM DU BELLAY 143'

as what has been called poesie intime, that intensely
modern sort of poetry in which the writer has for
his aim the portraiture of his own most intimate
moods, and to take the reader into his confidence. That
age had other instances of this intimacy of sentiment:
Montaigne's Essays are full of it, the carvings of the
church of Brou are full of it. M. Sainte-Beuve has
perhaps exaggerated the influence of this quality in Du
Bellay's Regrets; but the very name of the book has
a touch of Rousseau about it, and reminds one of a
whole generation of self-pitying poets in modern times.
It was in the atmosphere of Rome, to him so strange
and mournful, that these pale flowers grew up. For that
journey to Italy, which he deplored as the greatest mis-
fortune of his life, put him in full possession of his
talent, and brought out all its originality. And in effect
you do find intimacy, intimite, here. The trouble of
his life is analysed, and the sentiment of it tonveyed
directly to our minds ; not a great sorrow or passion, but
only the sense of loss in passing days, the ennui of a
dreamer who must plunge into the world's affairs, the
opposition between actual life and the ideal, a longing
for rest, nostalgia, home-sickness that pre-eminently
childish, but so suggestive sorrow, as significant of the
final regret of all human creatures for the familiar earth
and limited sky.

The feeling for landscape is often described as a
modern one ; still more so is that for antiquity, the senti-
ment of ruins. Du Bellay has this sentiment. The
duration of the hard, sharp outlines of things is a grief
to him, and passing his wearisome days among the ruins
of ancient Rome, he is consoled by the thought that all

144 THE RENAISSANCE

must one day end, by the sentiment of the grandeur of
nothingness la grandeur du rien. With a strange touch
of far-off mysticism, he thinks that the great whole
le grand tout into which all other things pass and lose
themselves, ought itself sometimes to perish and pass
away. Nothing less can relieve his weariness. From the
stately aspects of Rome his thoughts went back con-
tinually to France, to the smoking chimneys of his little
village, the longer twilight of the North, the soft climate
of Anjou la douceur Angevine; yet not so much to
the real France, we may be sure, with its dark streets
and roofs of rough-hewn slate, as to that other country,
with slenderer towers, and more winding rivers, and trees
like flowers, and with softer sunshine on more grace-
fully-proportioned fields and ways, which the fancy of
the exile, and the pilgrim, and of the schooboy far from
home, and of those kept at home unwillingly, everywhere
builds up before or behind them.

He came home at last, through the Grisons, by slow
journeys ; and there, in the cooler air of his own country,
under its skies of milkier blue, the sweetest flower of his
genius sprang up. There have been poets whose whole
fame has rested on one poem, as Gray's on the Elegy in a
Country Churchyard, or Ronsard's, as many critics have
thought, on the eighteen lines of one famous ode. Du
Bellay has almost been the poet of one poem; and this
one poem of his is an Italian product transplanted into
that green country of Anjou ; out of the Latin verses of
Andrea Navagero, into French. But it is a composition
in which the matter is almost nothing, and the form
almost everything; and the form of the poem as if
stands, written in old French, is all Du Bellay's own.

JOACHIM DU BELLAY 145

It is a song which the winnowers are supposed to sing
a they winnow the corn, and they invoke the winds to
lie lightly on the grain.

D'UN V ANN EUR DE BLE AUX VENTS. 1

A vows trouppe

Qui d'aile passagere
Par le monde volez,
Et d'un siiHant murmur e
L'ombrageuse verdure
Doulcement esbranlez.

J' off re ces violettes,

Ces lis & ces fieurettes,
Et ces roses icy,
Ces vermeillettes roses
Sont freschement ecloses,
Et ces alliets aussi.

De vostre doulce haleine
Event ez ceste plaine
Eventez ce sejour;
Ce pendant que fahanne
A mon ble que je vanne
A la chaleur du jour.

That has, in the highest degree, the qualities, the value,
of the whole Pleiad school of poetry, of the whole
phase of taste from which that school derives a certain
silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasure of which
is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in
which a thing slight in itself is handled. The sweetness

*A graceful translation of this and some other poems of
the Pleiad may be found in Ballads and Lyrics of Old
France, by Mr. Andrew Lang.

146 THE RENAISSANCE

of it is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you
crush wild herbs to get at their perfume. One seems
to hear the measured motion of the fans, with a child's
pleasure on coming across the incident for the first
time, in one of those great barns of Du Bellay's own
country, La Beauce, the granary of France. A sudden
light transfigures some trivial thing, a weather-vane, a
windmill, a winnowing fan, the dust in the barn door.
A moment and the thing has vanished, because it was
pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing
that the accident may happen again.

WINCKELMANN

ET EGO IN ARCADIA FUI

GOETHE'S fragments of art-criticism contain a few
pages of strange pregnancy on the character of Winckel-
mann. He speaks of the teacher who had made his
career possible, but whom he had never seen, as of an
abstract type of culture, consummate, tranquil, with-
drawn already into the region of ideals, yet retaining
colour from the incidents of a passionate intellectual life.
He classes him with certain works of art, possessing an
inexhaustible gift of suggestion, to which criticism may
return again and again with renewed freshness. Hegel,
in his lectures on the Philosophy of Art, estimating the
work of his predecessors, has also passed a remarkable
judgment on Winckelmann's writings: "Winckelmann,
by contemplation of the ideal works of the ancients,
received a sort of inspiration, through which he opened
a new sense for the study of art. He is to be regarded
as one of those who, in the sphere of art, have known
how to initiate a new organ for the human spirit." That
it has given a new sense, that it has laid open a new
organ, is the highest that can be said of any critical
effort. It is interesting, then, to ask what kind of man
it was who thus laid open a new organ. Under what
conditions was that effected?

Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born at Stendal.

148 THE RENAISSANCE

5n Brandenburg, in the year 1717. The child of a poor
tradesman, he passed through many struggles in early
youth, the ^memory of which ever remained in him as
a fitful cause of dejection. In 1763, in the full emanci-
pation of his spirit, looking over the beautiful Roman
prospect, he writes "One gets spoiled here; but God
owed me this; in my youth I suffered too much."
Destined to assert and interpret the charm of the
Hellenic spirit, he served first a painful apprenticeship in
the tarnished intellectual world of Germany in the earlier
half of the eighteenth century. Passing out of that
into the happy light of the antique, he had a sense of
exhilaration almost physical. We find him as a child
in the dusky precincts of a German school, hungrily
feeding on a few colourless books. The master of this
school grows blind ; Winckelmann becomes his famulus.
The old man would have had him study theology.
Winckelmann, free of the master's library, chooses rather
to become familiar with the Greek classics. Herodotus
and Homer win, with their "vowelled" Greek, his
warmest enthusiasm ; whole nights of fever are devoted
to them; disturbing dreams of an Odyssey of his own
come to him. "He felt in himself/* says Madame de
Stael, "an ardent attraction towards the south. In Ger-
man imaginations even now traces are often to be found
of that love of the sun, that weariness of the North
(cette fatigue du nord), which carried the northern
peoples away into the countries of the South. A fine
sky brings to birth sentiments not unlike the love of one's
Fatherland/'

To most of us, after all our steps towards it, the
antique world, in spite of its intense outlines, its own

WINCKELMANN 149

perfect self-expression, still remains faint and remote.
To him, closely limited except on the side of the ideal,
building for his dark poverty "a house not made with
hands," it early came to seem more real than the present.
In the fantastic plans of foreign travel continually
passing through his mind, to Egypt, for instance, and to
France, there seems always tb be rather a wistful sense
of something lost to be regained, than the desire of dis-
covering anything new. Goethe has told us how, in
his eagerness actually to handle the antique, he became
interested in the insignificant vestiges of it which the
neighbourhood of Strasburg afforded. So we hear of
Winckelmann's boyish antiquarian wanderings among
the ugly Brandenburg sandhills. Such a conformity
between himself and Winckelmann, Goethe would have
gladly noted.

At twenty-one he enters the University of Halle, to
study theology, as his friends desire ; instead, he becomes
the enthusiastic translator of H'erodotus. The condition
of Greek learning in German schools and universities had
fallen, and there were no professors at Halle who could
satisfy his sharp, intellectual craving. Of his profes-
sional education he always speaks with scorn, claiming
to have been his own teacher from first to last. His
* appointed teachers did not perceive that a new source
of culture was within their hands. Homo vagus et
inconstant! one of them pedantically reports of the
future pilgrim to Rome, unaware on which side his
irony was whetted. When professional education confer!
nothing but irritation on a Schiller, no one ought to be
Surprised; for Schiller, and such as he, are primarily
spiritual adventurers. But that Winckelmann, the votary

j S o THE RENAISSANCE

of the gravest of intellectual traditions, should get noth-
ing but an attempt at suppression frbm the professional
guardians of learning, is what may well surprise us.

In 1743 he became master of a school at Seehausen.
This was the most wearisome period of his life. Not-
withstanding a success, in dealing with children, which
seems to testify to something simple and primeval in his
nature, he found the work of teaching very depressing.
Engaged in this work, he writes that he still has within
him a longing desire to attain to the knowledge of
beauty sehnlich wunschte zur Kenntniss des Schonen
zu gelangen. He had to shorten his nights, sleeping
only four hours, to gain time for reading. And here
Winckelmann made a step forward in culture. He
multiplied his intellectual force by detaching from it all
flaccid interests. He renounced mathematics and law, in
which his reading had been considerable, all but the
literature of the arts. Nothing was to enter into his
life unpenetrated by its central enthusiasm. At this
time he undergoes the charm of Voltaire. Voltaire
belongs to that flimsier, more artificial, classical tradi-
tion, which Winckelmann was one day to supplant, by
the clear ring, the eternal outline, of the genuine antique.
But it proves the authority of such a gift as Voltaire's
that it allures and wins even those born to supplant it. <
Voltaire's impression on Winckelmann was never effaced ;
and it gave him a consideration for French literature
which contrasts with his contempt for the literary
products of Germany. German literature transformed,
siderealised, as we see it in Goethe, reckons Winckel-
mann among its initiators.* But Germany at that time
presented nothing in which he could have anticipated

WINCKELMAN1* 151

Iphigenie, and the formation of an effective classical
tradition in German literature.

Under this purely literary influence, Winckelmann
protests against Christian Wolff and the philosophers.
Goethe, in speaking of this protest, alludes to his own
obligations to Emmanuel Kant. Kant's influence over the
culture of Goethe, which he tells us could not have been
resisted by him without loss, consisted in a severe limita-
tion to the concrete. But he adds, that in born anti-
quaries, like Winckelmann, a constant handling of the
antique, with its eternal outline, maintains that limitation
as effiectually as a critical philosophy. Plato, however,
saved so often for his redeeming literary manner, is
excepted from Winckelmann's proscription of the
philosophers. The modern student most often meets
Plato on that side which seems to pass beyond Plato
into a world no longer pagan, based upon the conception
of a spiritual life. But the element of affinity which he
presents to Winckelmann is that which is wholly Greek,
and alien from the Christian world, represented by that
group of brilliant youths in the Lysis, still uninfected by
any spiritual sickness, finding the end of all endeavour
in the aspects of the human form, the continual stir and
motion of a comely human life.

This new-found interest in Plato's dialogues could
not fail to increase his desire to visit the countries of the
classical tradition. "It is my misfortune," he writes,
"that I was not born to great place, wherein I might have
had cultivation, and the opportunity of following my
instinct and forming myself." A visit to Rome prob-
ably was already designed, and he silently preparing for
it. Count Biinau, the author of a historical work then of

' 152 THE RENAISSANCE

note, had collected at Nothenitz a valuable library, now
part of the library of Dresden. In 1748 Winckelmann
wrote to Biinau in halting French : He is emboldened,
he says, by Biinau's indulgence for needy men of letters.
He desires only to devote himself to study, having never
allowed himself to be dazzled by favourable prospects
in the Church. He hints at his doubtful position "in a
metaphysical age, by which humane literature is
trampled under foot. At present," he goes on, "little
value is set on Greek literature, to which I have devoted
myself so far as I could penetrate, when good books are
so scarce and expensive." Finally, he desires a place in
some corner of Biinau's library. "Perhaps, at some
future time, I shall become more useful to the public,
if, drawn from obscurity in whatever way, I can find
means to maintain myself in the capital."

Soon afterwards we find Winckelmann in the library
at Nothenitz. Thence he made many visits to the collec-
tion of antiquities at Dresden. He became acquainted
with many artists, above all with Oeser, Goethe's future
friend and master, who, uniting a high culture with the
practical knowledge of art, was fitted to minister to
Winckelmann's culture. And now a new channel of
communion with the Greek life was opened for him.
Hitherto he had handled the words only of Greek poetry,
stirred indeed and roused by them, yet divining beyond
the words some unexpressed pulsation of sensuous lift.
Suddenly he is in contact with that life, still fervent in
the relics of plastic art. Filled as our culture is with
the classical spirit, we can hardly imagine how ~ deeply
the human mind was moved, when, at the Renaissance,
in the midst of a frozen world, the buried fire of ancient

WINCKELMANN 153

art rose up from under the soil. Winckelmann here
reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renais-
sance. On a sudden the imagination feels itself free.
How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the
senses and the understanding, when once we have appre-
hended it ! Here, surely, is that .more liberal mode of
life we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the
while. How mistaken and .roundabout have been our
efforts to reach it by mystic passipn, and monastic
reverie ; how they have deflowered the flesh ; how little
have they really emancipated us ! Hermione melts from
her stony posture, and the lost proportions of life right
themselves. Here, then, in vivid realisation we see the
native tendency of Winckelmann to escape from abstract
theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch.
Lessing, in the Laocoon, has theorised finely on the
relation of poetry to sculpture; and philosophy may
give us theoretical reasons why not poetry but sculpture
should be the most sincere and exact expression of the
Greek ideal. By a happy, unperplexed dexterity,
Winckelmann solves the question in the concrete. It is
what Goethe calls his Gewahrwerden der griechischen
Kunst, his finding of Greek art.

Through the tumultuous richness of Goethe's culture,
the influence of Winckelmann is always discernible, as
the strong, regulative under-current of a clear, antique
motive. "One learns nothing from him," he says to
Eckermann, "but one becomes something." If we ask
what the secret of this influence was, Goethe himself
will tell us wholeness, unity with one's self, intellec-
tual integrity. And yet these expressions, because they
fit Goethe, with his universal culture, so well, seem hardly

154 THE RENAISSANCE

to describe the narrow, exclusive interest of Winckel-
mann. Doubtless Winckelmann's perfection is a narrow
perfection: his feverish nursing of the one motive of
his life is a contrast to Goethe's various energy. But
what affected Goethe, what instructed him and ministered
to his culture, was the integrity, the truth to its type, of
the given force. The development of this force was the
single interest of Winckelmann, unembarrassed by any-
thing else in him. Other interests, practical or intellec-
tual, those slighter talents and motives not supreme,
which in most men are the waste part of nature, and
drain away their vitality, he plucked out and cast from
him. The protracted longing of his youth is not a
vague, romantic longing: he knows what he longs for,
what he wills. Within its severe limits his enthusiasm
burns like lava. "You know/' says Lavater, speaking
of Winckelmann's countenance, "that I consider ardor
and indifference by no means incompatible in the same
character. If ever there was a striking instance of that
union, it is in the countenance before us." "A lowly
childhood/' says Goethe, "insufficient instruction in
youth, broken, distracted studies in early manhood, the
burden of school-keeping! He was thirty years old
before he enjoyed a single favor of fortune: but so
soon as he had attained to an adequate condition of
freedom, he appears before us consummate and entire,
complete in the ancient sense."

But his hair is turning grey, and he has not yet reached
the south. The Saxon court had become Roman
Catholic, and the way to favour at Dresden was through
Roman ecclesiastics. Probably the thought of a pro-
fession of the papal religion was not new to Winckel-

WINCKELMANN 155'

mann. At one time he had thought of begging his way
to Rome, from cloister to cloister, under the pretence of
a disposition to change his faith. In 1751, the papal
nuncio, Archinto, was one of the visitors at Nothenitz,
He suggested Rome as the fitting stage for Winckel-
mann's accomplishments and held out the hope of a
place in the Pope's library. Cardinal Passionei, charmed
with Winckelmann's beautiful Greek writing, was ready
to play the part of Maecenas, if the indispensable change
were made. Winckelmann accepted the bribe, and visited
the nuncio at Dresden. Unquiet still at the word "pro-
fession," not without a struggle, he joined the Roman
Church, July the nth, 1754.

Goethe boldly pleads that Winckelmann was a pagan,
that the landmarks of Christendom meant nothing to
him. It is clear that he intended to deceive no one by
his disguise; fears of the inquisition are sometimes
visible during his life in Rome; he entered Rome
notoriously with the works of Voltaire in his possession ;
the thought of what Count Biinau might be thinking
of him seems to have been his greatest difficulty. On
the other hand, he may have had a sense of a certain
antique and as it were pagan grandeur in the Roman
Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbed Protes-
tantism, which had been the ennui of his youth, he
might reflect that while Rorhe had reconciled itself to
the Renaissance, the Protestant principle in art had
cut off Germany from the supreme tradition of beauty.
And yet to that transparent nature, with its simplicity
as of the earlier world, the loss of absolute sincerity
must have been a real loss. Goethe understands that
Winckelmann had made this sacrifice. Yet at the bar of

156 THE RENAISSANCE

the highest criticism, perhaps, Winckelmann may be
absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was
only one incident of a culture in which the moral instinct,
like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic.
But then the artistic interest was that, by desperate
faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from the
mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves
ever in a bloodless routine, and misses its one chance in
the life of the spirit and the intellect. There have been
instances of culture developed by every high motive in
turn, and yet intense at every point ; and the aim of our
culture should be to attain not only as intense but as
complete a life as possible. But often the higher life
is only possible at all, on condition of the selection of
that in which one's motive is native and strong; and this
selection involves the renunciation of a crown reserved
for others. Which is better? to lay open a new sense,
to initiate a new organ for the human spirit, or to
cultivate many types of perfection up to a point which
leaves us still beyond the range of their transforming
power? Savonarola is one type of success; Winckel-
mann is another; criticism can reject neither, because
each is true to tiself . Winckelmann himself explains the
motive of his life when he says, "It will be my highest
reward, if posterity acknowledges that I have written
worthily."

For a time he remained at Dresden. There his first
book appeared, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek
Works of Art in Painting and Sculpture. Full of
obscurities as it was, obscurities which baffled but did
not offend Goethe when he first turned to art-criticism,
its purpose was direct an appeal from the artificial

WINCKELMANN 157

classicism of the day to the study of the antique. The
book was well received, and a pension supplied through
the king's confessor. In September 1755 he started fot
Rome, in the company of a young Jesuit. He was
introduced to Raphael Mengs, a painter then of note f
and found a home near him, in the artists' quarter, in
a place where he could "overlook, far and wide, the
eternal city." At first he was perplexed with the sense
of being a stranger on what was to him, spiritually,
native soil. "Unhappily," he cries in French, often
selected by him as the vehicle of strong feeling, "I am
one of those whom the Greeks call o^a/iafleis. I have
come into the world and into Italy too late/' More than
thirty ears afterwards, Goethe also, after many aspira-
tions and severe preparation of mind, visited Italy. In
early manhood, just as he, too, was finding Greek art,
the rumour of that true artist's life of Winckelmann in
Italy had strongly moved him. At Rome, spending a
whole year drawing from the antique, in preparation for
Iphigenie, he finds the stimulus of Winckelmann's
memory ever active. Winckelmann's Roman life was
simple, primeval, Greek. His delicate constitution per-
mitted him the use only of bread and wine. Condemned
by many as a renegade, he had no desire for places of
honour, but only to see his merits acknowledged, and
existence assured to him. He was simple without being
niggardly ; he desired to be neither poor nor rich.

Winckelmann's first years in Rome present all the
elements of an intellectual situation of the highest
interest. The beating of the soul against its bars, the
sombre aspect, the alien traditions, the stili barbarous
literature of Germany, are afar off; before him are

158 THE RENAISSANCE

adequate conditions of culture, the sacred soil itself, the
first tokens of the advent of the new German literature,
with its broad horizons, its boundless intellectual promise.
Dante, passing from the darkness of the Inferno, is filled
with a sharp and joyful sense of light, which makes him
deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio, in a
wonderfully touching and penetrative way. Hellenism,
which is the principle pre-eminently of intellectual light
(our modern culture may have more colour, the medieval
spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism
is pre-eminent for light), has always been most
effectively conceived by those who have crept into it
out of an intellectual world in which the sombre elements
predominate. So it had been in the ages of the Renais-
sance. This repression, removed at last, gave force
and glow to Winckelmann's native affinity to the Hellenic
spirit. 'There had been known before him/' says
Madame de Stael, "learned men who might be consulted
like books ; but no one had, if I may say so, made himself
a pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity." "One
is always a poor executant of conceptions not one's
own." On execute mat ce qu'on n'a pas congu soi-meme*
are true iji their measure of every genuine enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm, that, in the broad Platonic sense of the
Phaedrus, was the secret of his divinatory power over
the Hellenic world. This enthusiasm, dependent as it
is to a great degree on bodily temperament, has a power
of re-enforcing the purer emotions of the intellect with
an almost physical excitement. That his affinity with
Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler
threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved
1 Words of Charlotte Corday before the Convention.

WINCKELMAftN

by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men.
He has known, he says, many young men more beautiful
than Guido's archangel These friendships, bringing him
into contact with the pride of human form, and staining 1
the thoughts with its bloom, perfected his reconciliation
to the spirit of Greek sculpture. A letter on taste,
addressed from Rome to a young nobleman, Friedrich
von Berg, is the record of such a friendship.

"I shall excuse my delay," he begins, "in fulfilling my
promise of an essay on the taste for beauty in works of
art, in the words of Pindar. He says to Agesidamus, a
youth of Locri Ideq, re Ka\6v, &p$ re Ktxpa.ii.lvov whom
he had kept waiting for an intended ode, that a debt
paid with usury is the end of reproach. This may win
your good-nature on behalf of my present essay, which
has turned out far more detailed and circumstantial
than I had at first intended.

"It is from yourself that the subject is taken. Our
intercourse has been short, too short both for you and
me; but the first time I saw you, the affinity of our
spirits was revealed to me : your culture proved that my
hope was not groundless ; and I found in a beautiful
body a soul created for nobleness, gifted with the sense
of beauty. My parting from you was, therefore, one of
the most painful in my life; and that this feeling con-
tinues our common friend is witness, for your separa-
tion from me leaves me no hope of seeing you again.
Let this essay be a memorial of our friendship, which,
on my side, is "free from every selfish motive, and ever
remains subject and dedicate to yourself alone."

The following passage is characteristic

"As it is confessedly the beauty of man which is to

160 THE RENAISSANCE

be conceived under one general idea, so I have noticed
that those who are observant of beauty only in women,
and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men,
seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for
beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek
art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty
is rather male than female. But the beauty of art
demands a higher sensibility than the beauty of nature,
because the beauty of art, like tears shed at a play, gives
no pain, is without life, and must be awakened and
repaired by culture. Now, as the spirit of culture is
much more ardent in youth than in manhood, the instinct
of which I am speaking must be exercised and directed
to what is beautiful, before that age is reached, at which
one would be afraid to confess that one had no taste
for it."

Certainly, of that beauty of living form which regu-
lated Winckelmann's friendships, it could not be said
that it gave no pain. One notable friendship, the fortune
of which we may trace through his letters, begins with
an antique, chivalrous letter in French, and ends noisily
in a burst of angry fire. Far from reaching the quietism,
the bland indifference of art, such attachments are never-
theless more susceptible than any others of equal strength
of a purely intellectual culture. Of passion, of physical
excitement, they contain only just so much as stimulates
the eye to the finest delicacies of colour and form. These
friendships, often the caprices of a moment, make
Winckelmann's letters, with their troubled colouring, an
instructive but bizarre addition to the History of Art,
that shrine of grave and mellow light around the mute
Olympian family. The impression which Winckelmann's

WINCKELMANN 161

literary life conveyed to those about him was that of
excitement, intuition, inspiration of general principles.
The quick, susceptible enthusiast, betraying his tempera-
ment even in appearance, by his olive complexion, his'
deep-seated, piercing eyes, his rapid movements, appre-
hended the subtlest principles of the Hellenic manner,
not through the understanding, but by instinct or touch.
A German biographer of Winckelmann has compared
him to Columbus. That is not the aptest of comparisons ;
but it reminds one of a passage in which Edgar Quinet
describes the great discoverer's famous voyage. His
science was often at fault; but he had a way of esti-
mating at once the slightest indication of land, in a
floating weed or passing bird; he seemed actually to
come neareV to nature than other men. And that world
in which others had moved with so much embarrassment,
seems to call out in Winckelmann new senses fitted . to
deal with it. He is in touch with it ; it penetrates him,
and becomes part of his temperament. He remodels
his writings with constant renewal of insight ; he catches
the thread of a whole sequence of laws in some hollowing
of the hand, or dividing of the hair ; he seems to realise
that fancy of the reminiscence of a forgotten knowledge
hidden for a time in the mind itself; as if the mind of
one, lover and philosopher at once in some phase of
pre-existence <t>iKo(ro<t>ri<ras irbre per' epcoros fallen into
a new cycle, were beginning its intellectual career
over again, yet with a certain power of anticipating
its results. So comes the truth of Goethe's judgments
on his works; they are a life, a living thing, designed
for those who are alive ein Lebendiges fur die Leben~
dig en f geschrieben, ein Leben selbst.

i62 THE RENAISSANCE

In 1758 Cardinal Albani, who had formed in his
Roman villa a precious collection of antiquities, became
Winckelmann's patron. Pompeii had just opened its
treasures; Winckelmann gathered its first fruits. But
his plan of a visit to Greece remained unfulfilled. From
his first arrival in Rome he had kept the History of
Ancient Art ever in view. All his other writings were
a preparation for that. It appeared, finally, in 1764; but
even after its publication Winckelmann was still
employed in perfecting it. It is since his time that many
of the most significant examples of Greek art have been
submitted to criticism. He had seen little or nothing of
what we ascribe to the age of Pheidias; and his con-
ception of Greek art tends, therefore, to put the mere
elegance of the imperial society of ancient Rome in
place of the severe and chastened grace of the palaestra.
For the most part he had to penetrate to Greek art
through copies, imitations, and later Roman art itself;
and it is not surprising that this turbid medium has left
in Winckelmann's actual results much that a more
privileged criticism can correct.

He had been twelve years in Rome. Admiring Ger-
many had made many calls to him. At last, in 1768,
he set out to revisit the country of his birth ; and as he
left Rome, a strange, inverted home-sickness, a strange
reluctance to leave it at all, came over him. He reached
Vienna. There he was loaded with honours and presents :
other cities were awaiting him. Goethe, then nineteen
years old, studying art at Leipsic, was expecting his
coming, with that wistful eagerness which marked his
youth, when the news of Winckelmann's murder arrived.
All his "weariness of the North" had revived with

WINCKELMANN 163

double force. He left Vienna, intending to hasten back
to Rome, and at Trieste a delay of a few days occurred.
With characteristic openness, Winckelmann had confided
his plans to a fellow-traveller, a man named Arcangeli,
and had shown him the gold medals received at Vienna.
Arcangeli's avarice was aroused. One morning he
entered Winckelmann's room, under pretence of taking
leave. Winckelmantj was then writing "memoranda for
the future editor of the History of Art/' still seeking the
perfection of his great work. Arcangeli begged to see
the medals once more. As Winckelmann stooped down
to take them from the chest, a cord was thrown round
his neck. Some time afterwards, a child with whose
(companionship Winckelmann had beguiled his delay.,
knocked at the door, and receiving no answer, gave th$
alarm. Winckelmann was found dangerously wounded,
and died a few hours later, after receiving the last
sacraments. It seemed as if the gods, in reward tof.
his devotion to them, had given him a death which, for
its swiftness and its opportunity, he might well have
desired. "He has/' says Goethe, "the advantage of
figuring in the memory of posterity, as one eternally able
and strong; for the image in which one leaves the worl<)
is that in which one moves among the shadows." Yet,
perhaps, it is not fanciful to regret that his proposed
meeting with Goethe never took place. Goethe, then in
all the pregnancy of his wonderful youth, still unruffled
by the "stress and storm" of his earlier manhood, was
awaiting Winckelmann with a curiosity of the worthiest
kind. As it was, Winckelmann became to him something
like what Virgil was to Dante. And Winckelmann, with
his fiery friendships, had reached that age and that period

164 THE RENAISSANCE

of culture at which emotions hitherto fitful, sometimes
concentrate themselves in a vital, unchangeable relation-
ship. German literary history seems to have lost the
chance of one of those famous friendships, the very
tradition of which becomes a stimulus to culture, and
exercises an imperishable influence.

In one of the frescoes of the Vatican, Raphael has
commemorated the tradition of the Catholic religion.
Against a space of tranquil sky, broken in upon by the
beatific vision, are ranged the great personages of
Christian history, with the Sacrament in the midst.
Another fresco of Raphael in the same apartment pre-
sents a very different company, Dante alone appearing in
both. Surrounded by the muses of Greek mythology,
under a thicket of laurel, sits Apollo, with the sources
of Castalia at his feet. On either side are grouped those
on whom the spirit of Apollo descended, the classical
and Renaissance poets, to whom the waters of Castalia
come down, a river making glad this other "city of
God." In this fresco it is the classical tradition, the
orthodoxy of taste, that Raphael commemorates. Winck-
elmann's intellectual history authenticates the claims of
this tradition in human culture. In the countries where
that tradition arose, where it still lurked about its own
artistic relics, and changes of language had not broken
its continuity, national pride might sometimes light up
anew an enthusiasm for it. Aliens might imitate that
enthusiasm, and classicism become from time to time an
intellectual fashion. But Winckelmann was not further
removed by language, than by local aspects and associa-
tions, from those vestiges of the classical spirit ; and he

WINCKELMANN 165

lived at a time when, in Germany, classical studies were
out of favour. Yet, remote in time and place, he feels
after the Hellenic world, divines those channels of an-
cient art, in which its life still circulates, and, like Scyles,
the half-barbarous yet Hellenising king, in the beautiful
story of Herodotus, is irresistibly attracted by it. This
testimony to the authority of the Hellenic tradition, its
fitness to satisfy some vital requirement of the intellect,
which Winckelmann contributes as a solitary man of
genius, is offered also by the general history of the mind.
The spiritual forces of the past, which have prompted
and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live, in-
deed, within that culture, but with an absorbed, under-
ground life. The Hellenic element alone has not been
so absorbed, or content with this underground life ; from
time to time it has started to the surface; culture has
been drawn back to its sources to be clarified and cor-
rected. Hellenism is not merely an absorbed element in
our intellectual life; it is a conscious tradition in it.

Again, individual genius works ever under conditions
of time and place : its products are coloured by the vary-
ing aspects of nature, and type of human form, and out-
ward manners of life. There is thus an element of
change in art ; criticism must never for a moment forget
that "the artist is the child of his time." But besides
these conditions of time and place, and independent of
them, there is also an element of permanence, a standard
of taste, which genius confesses. This standard is main-
tained in a purely intellectual tradition. It acts upon
the artist, not as one of the influences of his own age,
but through those artistic products of the previous
generation which first excited, while they directed into

166 THE RENAISSANCE

a particular channel, his sense of beauty. The supreme
artistic products of succeeding generations thus form a
series of elevated points, taking each from each the re-
flection of a strange light, the source of which is not in
the atmosphere around and above them, but in a stage
of society remote from ours. The standard of taste,
then, was fixed in Greece, at a definite historical period.
A tradition for all succeeding generations, it originates
in a spontaneous growth out of the influences of Greek
society. What were the conditions under which this
ideal, this standard of artistic orthodoxy, was generated?
How was Greece enabled to force its thought upon
Europe ?

Greek art, when we first catch sight of it, is entangled
with Greek religion. We are accustomed to think of
Greek religion as the religion of art and beauty, the
religion of which the Olympian Zeus and the Athena
Polias are the idols, the poems of Homer the sacred
books. Thus Cardinal Newman speaks of "the classical
polytheism which was gay and graceful, as was natural
in a civilised age." Yet such a view is only a partial
one. In it the eye is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of
high Hellenic culture, but loses sight of the sombre world
across which it strikes. Greek religion, where we can
observe it most distinctly, is at once a magnificent ritu-
alistic system, and a cycle of poetical conceptions. Re-
ligions, as they grow by natural laws out of man's life,
are modified by whatever modifies his life. They brighten
under a bright sky, they become liberal as the social
range widens, they grow intense and shrill in the clefts
of human life, where the spirit is narrow and confined,
and the stars are visible at noonday : and a fine analysis

WINCKELMANN 167

of these differences is one of the gravest functions of
religious criticism. Still, the broad foundation, in mere
human nature, of all religions as they exist for the great-
est number, is a universal pagan sentiment, a paganism
which existed before the Greek religion, and has lingered
far onward into the Christian world, ineradicable, like
some persistent vegetable growth, because its seed is an
element of the very soil out of which it springs.

This pagan sentiment measures the sadness with which
the human mind is filled, whenever its thoughts wander
far from what is here, and now. It is beset by notions
of irresistible natural powers, for the most part ranged
against man, but the secret also of his fortune, making
the earth golden and the grape fiery for him. He makes
gods in his own image, gods smiling and flower-crowned,
or bleeding by some sad fatality, to console him by their
wounds, never closed from generation to generation. It
is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death
presents itself. He would remain at home for ever on
the earth if he could. As it loses its colour and the senses
fail, he clings ever closer to it ; but since the mouldering
of bones and flesh must go on to the end, he is careful
for charms and talismans which may chance to have
some friendly power in them when the inevitable ship*
wreck comes. Such sentiment is a part of the eternal basis*
of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and
place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep ivj
the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initi-
ators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as
eagles," but the broad level of religious life is not per*
manently changed. Religious progress, like all purely
spiritual progress, is confined to a few. This sentiment

168 THE RENAISSANCE

attaches itself in the earliest times to certain usages of
partriarchal life, the kindling of fire, the washing of the
body, the slaughter of the flock, the gathering of harvest,
holidays and dances. Here are the beginnings of a
ritual, at first as occasional and unfixed as the sentiment
which it expresses, but destined to become the permanent
element of religious life. The usages of patriarchal life
change ; but this germ of ritual remains, promoted now
with a consciously religious motive, losing its domestic
character, and therefore becoming more and more in-
explicable with each generation. Such pagan worship,
in spite of local variations, essentially one, is an element
in all religions. It is the anodyne which the religious
principle, like one administering opiates to the incurable,
has added to the law which makes life sombre for the
vast majority of mankind.

More definite religious conceptions come from other
sources, and fix themselves upon this ritual in various
ways, changing it, and giving it new meanings. In
Greece they were derived from mythology, itself not
due to a religious source at all, but developing in the
course of time into a body of religious conceptions, en-
tirely human in form and character. To the unpro-
gressive ritual element it brought these conceptions, it-
self ^ vTpov Suva/us, the power of the wing an element
of refinement, of ascension, with the promise of an end-
less destiny. While the ritual remains unchanged, the aes-
thetic element, only accidentally connected with it, ex-
pands with the freedom and mobility of the things of
the intellect. Always, the fixed element is the religious
observance; the fluid, unfixed element is the myth, the
religious conception. This religion is itself pagan, and

WINCKELMANN 169

has in any broad view of it the pagan sadness. It does
not at once, and for the majority, become the higher
Hellenic religion. The country people, of course, cherish
the unlovely idols of an earlier time, such as those which
Pausanias found still devoutly preserved in Arcadia.
Athenaeus tells the story of one who, coming to a temple
of Latona, had expected to find some worthy presentment
of the mother of Apollo, and laughed on seeing only *
shapeless wooden figure. The wilder people have wilder
gods, which, however, in Athens, or Corinth, or Lace-
daemon, changing ever with the worshippers in whom
they live and move and have their being, borrow some-
thing of the lordliness and distinction of human nature
there. Greek religion, too, has its mendicants, its puri-
fications, its antinomian mysticism, its garments offered
to the gods, its statues worn with kissing, its exaggerated
superstitions for the vulgar only, its worship of sorrow,
its addolorata, its mournful mysteries. Scarcely a wild 7
or melancholy note of the medieval church but was an-
ticipated by Greek polytheism! What should we have
thought of the vertiginous prophetess at the very centre
of Greek religion? The supreme Hellenic culture is a
sharp edge of light across this gloom. The fiery, stupe*
fying wine becomes in a happier climate clear and exhil-
arating. The Dorian worship of Apollo, rational, chas<
tened, debonair, with his unbroken daylight, always opi
posed to the sad Chthonian divinities, is the aspiring ele*
ment, by force and spring of which Greek religion sub*
limes itself. Out of Greek religion, under happy con*
ditions, arises Greek art, to minister to human culture. It
was the privilege of Greek religion to be able to trans-
form itself into an artistic^ideal.

170 THE RENAISSANCE

For the thoughts of the Greeks about themselves, and
their relation to the world generally, were ever in the
happiest readiness to be transformed into objects for
the senses. In this lies the main distinction between
Greek art and the mystical art of the Christian middle
age, which is always struggling to express thoughts be-
yond itself. Take, for instance, a characteristic work
of the middle age, Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin
m the cloister of Saint Mark's at Florence. In some
strange halo of a moon Jesus and the Virgin Mother are
seated, clad in mystical white raiment, half shroud, half
priestly linen. Jesus, with rosy nimbus and the long, pale
hair tanquam lana alba et tanquam nixot the figure
in the Apocalypse, with slender finger-tips is setting a
crown of pearl on the head of Mary, who, corpse-like
in her refinement, is bending forward to receive it, the
light lying like snow upon her forehead. Certainly, it
cannot be said of Angelico's fresco that it throws into
a sensible form our highest thoughts about man and his
relation to the world ; but it did not do this adequately
even for Angelico. For him, all that is outward or
sensible in his work the hair like wool, the rosy nimbus,
the crown of pearl is only the symbol or type of a
really inexpressible world, to which he wishes to direct
the thoughts ; he would have shrunk from the notion that
what the eye apprehended was all. Such forms of art,
then, are inadequate to the matter they clothe; they re-
main ever below its level. Something of this kind is true
also of oriental art. As in the middle age from an ex-
aggerated inwardness, so in the East from a vagueness,
a want of definition, in thought, the matter presented to
art is unmanageable, and the forms of sense struggle

WINCKELMANN 171

vainly with it. The many-headed gods of the East, the
orientalised, many-breasted Diana of Ephesus, like An-
gelico's fresco, are at best overcharged symbols, a means
of hinting at an idea which art cannot fitly or completely
express, which still remains in the world of shadows.

But take a work of Greek art, the Venus of Melos.
That is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion, of anything
beyond its own victorious fairness. The mind begins,
and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the
spiritual motive. That motive is not lightly and loosely
attached to the sensuous form, as its meaning to an alle-
gory, but saturates and is identical with it. The Greek
mind had advanced to a particular stage of self-reflexion,
but was careful not to pass beyond it. In oriental
thought there is a vague conception of life everywhere,
but no true appreciation of itself by the mind, no knowl-
edge of the distinction of man's nature: in its conscious-
ness of itself, humanity is still confused with the fantas*
tic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable world,
In Greek thought, on the other hand, the "lordship of the
soul" is recognised; that lordship gives authority and
divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate
nature is thrown into the background. But just there
Greek thought finds its happy limit; it has not yet be-
come too inward ; the mind has not yet learned to boast
its independence of the flesh ; the spirit has not yet ab-
sorbed everything with its emotions, nor reflected its
own colour everywhere. It has indeed committed itself
to a train of reflexion which must end in defiance of
form, of all that is outward, in an exaggerated idealism.
But that end is still distant: it has not yet plunged into
the depths of religious mysticism.

172 THE RENAISSANCE

This ideal art, in which the thought does not outstrip
or lie beyond the proper range of its sensible embodi-
ment, could not have arisen out of a phase of life that
was uncomely or poor. That delicate pause in Greek re-
flexion was joined, by some supreme good luck, to the
perfect animal nature of the Greeks. Here are the two
conditions of an artistic ideal. The influences which
perfected the animal nature of the Greeks are part of
the process by which "the ideal" was evolved. Those
"Mothers" who, in the second part of Faust, mould and
remould the typical forms that appear in human history,
preside, at the beginning of Greek culture, over such a
concourse of happy physical conditions as ever generates
by natural laws some rare type of intellectual or spiritual
life. That delicate air, "nimbly and sweetly recommend-
ing itself" to the senses, the finer aspects of nature, the
finer lime and clay of the human form, and modelling
of the dainty frame- work of the human countenance :
these are the good luck of the Greek when he enters upon
life. Beauty becomes a distinction, like genius, or noble
place.

"By no people," says Winckelmann, "has beauty been
so highly esteemed as by the Greeks. The priests of a
youthful Jupiter at ^Egae, of the Ismenian Apollo, and
the priest who at Tanagra led the procession of Mercury,
bearing a lamb upon his shoulders, were always youths
to whom the prize of beauty had been awarded. The
citizens of Egesta erected a monument to a certain Philip,
who was not their fellow-citizen, but of Croton, for his
distinguished beauty ; and the people made offerings at it.
In an ancient song, ascribed to Simonides or Epichar-
mus, of four wishes,, the first was health, the second

WINCKELMANN 173

beauty. And as beauty was so longed for and prized by
the Greeks, every beautiful person sought to become
known to the whole people by this distinction, and above
all to approve himself to the artists because they awarded
the prize; and this was for the artists an occasion for
having supreme beauty ever before their eyes. Beauty
even gave a right to fame ; and we find in Greek histories
the most beautiful people distinguished. Some were
famous for the beauty of one single part of their form ;
as Demetrius Phalereus, for his beautiful eyebrows, was
called Charito-blepharos. It seems even to have been
thought that the procreation of beautiful children might
be promoted by prizes. This is shown by the existence
of contests for beauty, which in ancient times were es-
tablished by Cypselus, King of Arcadia, by the river
Alpheus ; and, at the feast of Apollo of Philse, a prize
was offered to the youths for the deftest kiss. This was
decided by an umpire ; as also at Megara, by the grave
of Diocles. At Sparta, and at Lesbos, in the temple of
Juno, and among the Parrhasii, there were contests for
beauty among women. The general esteem for beauty
went so far, that the Spartan women set up in their bed-
chambers a Nireus, a Narcissus, or a Hyacinth, that
they might bear beautiful children."

So, from a few stray antiquarianisms, a few faces cast
up sharply from the waves, Winckelmann, as his manner
was, divines the temperament of the antique world, and
that in which it had delight. It has passed away with
that distant age, and we may venture to dwell upon it,
What sharpness and reality it has is the sharpness and
reality of suddenly arrested life. The Greek system of
gymna'stics originated as part of a religious ritual. The

174 THE RENAISSANCE

worshipper was to recommend himself to the gods by
becoming fleet and fair, white and red, like them. The
beauty of the palaestra, and the beauty of the artist's
workshop, reacted on one another. The youth tried to
rival his gods ; and his increased beauty passed back into
them. "I take the gods to witness, I had rather have a
fair body than a king's crown" OAWVJLU Trdiras 0eote
JM) IXictfac. &v T'/JV jSao-tXkas &px?l v &wi TOV KaXfo dvai
that is the form in which one age of the world chose
the higher life. A perfect world, if the gods could have
seemed for ever only fleet and fair, white and red ! Let
us not regret that this unperplexed youth of humanity,
satisfied with the vision of itself, passed, at the due mo-
ment, into a mournful maturity; for already the deep
joy was in store for the spirit, of finding the ideal of
that youth still red with life in the grave.

It followed that the Greek ideal expressed itself pre-
eminently in sculpture. All art has a sensuous element,
colour, form, sound in poetry a dexterous recalling of
these, together with the profound, joyful sensuousness
of motion, and each of them may be a medium for the
ideal: it is partly accident which in any individual case
makes the born artist, poet, or painter rather than sculp-
tor. But as the mind itself has had an historical de-
velopment, one form of art, by the very limitations of
its material, may be more adequate than another for the
expression of any one phase of that development. Dif-
ferent attitudes of the imagination have a native affinity
with different types of sensuous form, so that they com-
bine together, with completeness and ease. The arts
may thus be ranged in a series, which corresponds to a
series of developments in the human mind itself. Archi-

WINCKELMANN 175

tecture, which begins in a practical need, can only express
by vague hint or symbol the spirit or mind of the artist.
He closes his sadness over him, or wanders in the per-
plexed intricacies of things, or projects his purpose from
him clean-cut and sincere, or bares himself to the sun-
light. But these spiritualities, felt rather than seen, can
but lurk about architectural form as volatile effects, to
be gathered from it by reflexion. Their expression is,
indeed, not really sensuous at all. As human form is
not the subject with which it deals, architecture is the
mode in which the artistic effort centres, when the
thoughts of man concerning himself are still indistinct,
when he is still little preoccupied with those harmonies,
storms, victories, of the unseen and intellectual world,
which, wrought out into the bodily form, give it an
interest and significance communicable to it alone. The
art of Egypt, with its supreme architectural effects, is,
according to Hegel's beautiful comparison, a Memnon
waiting for the day, the day of the Greek spirit, the
humanistic spirit, with its power of speech.

Again, painting, music, and poetry, with their endless
power of complexity, are the special arts of the romantic
and modern ages. Into these, with the utmost attenua-
tion of detail, may be translated every delicacy of thought
and feeling, incidental to a consciousness brooding with
delight over itself. Through their gradations of shade,
their exquisite intervals, they project in an external form
that which is most inward in passion or sentiment. Be-
tween architecture and those romantic arts of painting,
music, and poetry, comes sculpture, which, unlike archi-
tecture, deals immediately with man, while it contrasts
with the romantic arts because it is not self-analytical.

176 THE RENAISSANCE

It has to do more exclusively than any other art with
the human form, itself one entire medium of spiritual
expression, trembling, blushing, melting into dew, with
inward excitement. That spirituality which only lurks
about architecture as a volatile effect, in sculpture takes
up the whole given material, and penetrates it with an
imaginative motive; and at first sight sculpture, with its
solidity of form, seems a thing more real and full than
the faint, abstract world of poetry or painting. Still the
fact is the reverse. Discourse and action show man as
he is, more directly than the play of the muscles and the
moulding of the flesh; and over these poetry has com-
mand. Painting, by the flushing of colour in the face and
dilatation of light in the eye music, by its subtle range
of tones can refine most delicately upon a single mo-
ment of passion, unravelling its subtlest threads.

But why should sculpture thus limit itself to pure
form? Because, by this limitation, it becomes a perfect
medium of expression for one peculiar motive of the
imaginative intellect. It, therefore, renounces all those
attributes of its material which do not forward that
motive. It has had, indeed, from the beginning an un-
fixed claim to colour ; but this element of colour in it has
always been more or less conventional, with no melting
or modulation of tones, never permitting more than a
very limited realism. It was maintained chiefly as a
religious tradition. In proportion as the art of sculpture
ceased to be merely decorative, and subordinate to archi-
tecture, it threw itself upon pure form. It renounces
the power of expression by lower or heightened tones.
In it, no member of the human form is more significant
than the rest; the eye is wide, and without pupil; the

WINCKELMANN 177

lips and brow are hardly less significant than hands,
and breasts, and feet. But the limitation of its resources
is part of its pride: it has no backgrounds, no sky or
atmosphere, to suggest and interpret a train of feeling;
a little of suggested motion, and much of pure light on
its gleaming surfaces, with pure form only these. And
it gains more than it loses by this limitation to its own
distinguishing motives ; it unveils man in the repose of
his unchanging characteristics. That white light, purged
from the angry, bloodlike stains of action and passion,
reveals, not what is accidental in man, but the tranquil
godship in him, as opposed to the restless accidents of
life. The art of sculpture records the first naive, unper-
plexed recognition of man by himself ; and it is a proof
of the high artistic capacity of the Greeks, that they
apprehended and remained true to these exquisite limi-
tations, yet, in spite of them, gave to their creations a
mobile, a vital, individuality.

Heiterkeit blitheness or repose, and Allgemelnheit
generality or breadth, are, then, the supreme character-
istics of the Hellenic ideal. But that generality or
breadth has nothing in common with the lax observation,
the unlearned thought, the flaccid execution, which have
sometimes claimed superiority in art, on the plea of being
"broad" or "general." Hellenic breadth and generality
come of a culture minute, severe, constantly renewed,
rectifying and concentrating its impressions into certain
pregnant types.

The basis of all artistic genius lies in the power of
conceiving humanity in a new and striking way, of
putting; a happy world of its own creation in place of
the meaner world of our common days, generating

178 THE RENAISSANCE

around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of re-
fraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the im-
ages it transmits, according to the choice of the imagk
native intellect. In exercising this power, painting and
poetry have a variety of subject almost unlimited. The
range of characters or persons open to them is as various
as life itself; no character, however trivial, misshapen,
or unlovely, can resist their magic. That is because
those arts can accomplish their function in the choice and
development of some special situation, which lifts or
glorifies a character, in itself not poetical. To realise
this situation, to define, in a chill and empty atmosphere,
the focus where rays, in themselves pale and impotent,
unite and begin to burn, the artist may have, indeed, to
employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and re-
fine upon thought and passion a thousandfold. Let us
take a brilliant example from the poems of Robert
Browning. His poetry is pre-eminently the poetry of
situations. The characters themselves are always of
secondary importance ; often they are characters in them-
selves of little interest; they seem to come to him by
strange accidents from the ends of the world. His gift
is shown by the way in which he accepts such a charac-
ter, throws it into some situation, or apprehends it in
some delicate pause of life, in which for a moment it
becomes ideal. In the poem entitled Le Byron de nos
Jours, in his Dramatis Personae, we have a single mo-
ment of passion thrown into relief after this exquisite
fashion. Those two jaded Parisians are not intrinsically
interesting: they begin to interest us only when thrown
into a choice situation. But to discriminate that mo-
ment, to make it appreciable by us. that we may "find"

WINCKELMANN 179

it, what a cobweb of allusions, what double and treble
reflexions of the mind upon itself, what an artificial
light is constructed and broken over the chosen situation ;
on how fine a needle's point that little world of passion
is balanced ! Yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem has
the clear ring of a central motive. We receive from it
the impression of one imaginative tone, of a single cre-
ative act.

To produce such effects at all requires all the resources
of painting, withf its power of indirect expression, of
subordinate but significant detail, its atmosphere, its
foregrounds and backgrounds. To produce them in a
pre-eminent degree requires all the resources of poetry,
language in its most purged form, its remote associations
and suggestions, its double and treble lights. These ap
pliances sculpture cannot command. In it, therefore,
not the special situation, but the type, the general char-
acter of the subject to be delineated, is all-important.
In poetry and painting, the situation predominates over
the character ; in sculpture, the character over the situa-
tion. Excluded by the proper limitation of its material
from the development of exquisite situations, it has to
choose from a select number of types intrinsically inter-
esting interesting, that is, independently of any special
situation into which they may be thrown. Sculpture
finds the secret of its power in presenting these types,
in their broad, central, incisive lines. This it effects
not by accumulation of detail, but by abstracting from
it. All that is accidental, all that distracts the simple
effect upon us of the supreme types of humanity, all
traces in them of the commonness of the world, it gradu*
ally purges away.

180 THE RENAISSANCE

Works of art produced under this law, and only these,
are really characterised by Hellenic generality or breadth,
In every direction it is a law of restraint. It keeps passion
always below that degree of intensity at which it must
necessarily be transitory, never winding up the features
to one note of anger, or desire, or surprise. In some of
the feeble allegorical designs of the middle age, we find
isolated qualities potrayed as by so many masks ; its re-
ligious art has familiarised us with faces fixed immov-
ably into blank types of placid reverie. Men and women,
again, in the hurry of life, often wear the sharp impress
of one absorbing motive, from which it is said death
sets their features free. All such instances may be
ranged under the grotesque; and the Hellenic ideal has
nothing in common with the grotesque. It allows pas-
sion to play lightly over the surface of the individual
form, losing thereby nothing of its central impassivity,
its depth and repose. To all but the highest culture, the
reserved faces of the gods will ever have something of
insipidity.

Again, in the best Greek sculpture, the archaic im-
- mobility has been stirred, its forms are in motion ; but
it is a motion ever kept in reserve, and very seldom com-
mitted to any definite action. Endless as are the atti-
tudes of Greek sculpture, exquisite as is the invention
of the Greeks in this direction, the actions or situations
it permits are simple and few. There is no Greek Ma-
donna; the goddesses are always childless. The actions
selected are those which would be without significance,
except in a divine person binding on a sandal or pre-
paring for the bath. When a more complex and signi-
ficant action is permitted, it is most often represented

WINCKELMANN 181

as just finished, so that eager expectancy is excluded, as
in the image of Apollo just after the slaughter of the
Python, or of Venus with the apple of Paris already in
her hand. The Laocoon, with all that patient science
through which it has triumphed over an almost unman-
ageable subject, marks a period in which sculpture has
begun to aim at effects legitimate, because delightful,
only in painting.

The hair, so rich a source of expression in painting,
because, relatively to the eye or the lip, it is mere drap-
ery, is withdrawn from attention ; its texture, as well as
its colour, is lost, its arrangement but faintly and severely
indicated, with no broken or enmeshed light. The eyes
are wide and directionless, not fixing anything with their
gaze, nor riveting the brain to any special external ob-
ject, the brows without hair. Again, Greek sculpture
deals almost exclusively with youth, where the moulding
of the bodily organs is still as if suspended between
growth and completion, indicated but not emphasised;
where the transition from curve to curve is so delicate
and elusive, that Winckelmann compares it to a quiet
sea, which, although we understand it to be in motion,
we nevertheless regard as an image of repose; where,
therefore, the exact degree of development is so hard to
apprehend. If a single product only of Hellenic art were
to be saved in the wreck of all beside, one might choose
perhaps from the "beautiful multitude" of the Panathe-
naic frieze, that line of youths on horseback, with their
level glances, their proud, patient lips, their chastened
reins, their whole bodies in exquisite service. This
colourless, unclassified purity of life, with its blending and
interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual, and physical

182 THE RENAISSANCE

elements, still folded together, pregnant with the possi-
bilities of a whole world closed within it, is the highest
expression of the indifference which lies beyond all that
is relative or partial. Everywhere there is the effect of
an awaking, of a child's sleep just disturbed. All these
effects are united in a single instance the adorante of
the museum of Berlin, a youth who has gained the wrest-
ler's prize, with hands lifted and open, in praise for the
victory. Fresh, unperplexed, it is the image of a man
as he springs first from the sleep of nature, his white
light taking no colour from any one-sided experience.
He is characterless, so far as character involves subjec-
tion to the accidental influences of life.

"This sense," says Hegel, "for the consummate model-
ling of divine and human forms was pre-eminently at
home in Greece. In its poets and orators, its historians
and philosophers, Greece cannot be conceived from a
central point, unless one brings, as a key to the under-
standing of it, an insight into the ideal forms of sculp-
ture, and regards the images of statesmen and philoso-
phers, as well as epic and dramatic heroes, from the ar-
tistic point of view. For those who act, as well as those
who create and think, have, in those beautiful days of
Greece, this plastic character. They are great and free,
and have grown up on the soil of their own individuality,
creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding
themselves to what they were, and willed to be. The
age of Pericles was rich in such characters ; Pericles him-
self, Pheidias, Plato, above all Sophocles, Thucydides
also, Xenophon and Socrates, each in his own order, the
perfection of one remaining undiminished by that of the
others. They are ideal artists of themselves., cast each

WINCKELMANN 183

in one flawless mould, works of art, which stand before
us as an immortal presentment of the gods. Of this
modelling also are those bodily works of art, the victors
in the Olympic games; yes! and even Phryne, who, as
the most beautiful of women, ascended naked out of
the water, in the presence of assembled Greece."

This key to the understanding of the Greek spirit,
Winckelmann possessed in his own nature, itself like a
relic of classical antiquity, laid open by accident to our
alien, modern atmosphere. To the criticism of that con*
summate Greek modelling he brought not only his culture
but his temperament. We have seen how definite was the
leading motive of that culture; how, like some central
root-fibre, it maintained the well-rounded unity of his
life through a thousand distractions. Interests not his,
nor meant for him, never disturbed him. In morals, as
in criticism, he followed the clue of instinct, of an un"
erring instinct. Penetrating into the antique world by
his passion, his temperament, he enunciated no formal
principles, always hard and erne-sided. Minute and
anxious as his culture was, he never became one-sidedly
self -analytical. Occupied ever with himself, perfecting
himself and developing his genius, he was not content,
as so often happens with such natures, that the atmos^
phere between him and other minds should be thick and
clouded ; he was ever jealously refining his meaning into
a form, express, clear, objective. This temperament he
nurtured and invigorated by friendships which kept him
always in direct contact with the spirit of youth. The
beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty: the
statues of the gods had the least traces of sex. Here
there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of ineffectual whole-

i&4 THE RENAISSANCE

ness of nature, yet with a true beauty and significance
of its own.

One result of this temperament is a serenity Heiter-
keit which characterises Winckelmann's handling of the
sensuous side of Greek art. This serenity is, perhaps, in
great measure, a negative quality: it is the absence of
any- sense of want, or corruption, or shame. With the
sensuous element in Greek art he deals in the pagan
manner ; and what is implied in that ? It has been some-
times said that art is a means of escape from "the tyr-
anny of the senses." It may be so for the spectator:
he may find that the spectacle of supreme works of art
takes from the life of the senses something of its turbid
fever. But this is possible for the spectator only be-
cause the artist, in producing those works, has gradually
sunk his intellectual and spiritual ideas in sensuous form.
He may live, as Keats lived, a pure life ; but his soul, like
that of Plato's false astronomer, becomes more and more
immersed in sense, until nothing which lacks the appeal
to sense has interest for him. How could such an one
ever again endure the greyness of the ideal or spiritual
world? The spiritualist is satisfied as he watches the
escape of the sensuous elements from his conceptions;
his interest grows, as the dyed garment bleaches in the
keener air. But the artist steeps his thought again and
again into the fire of colour. To the Greek this immersion
in the sensuous was, religiously, at least, indifferent.
Greek sensuousness, therefore, does not fever the con-
science: it is shameless and childlike. Christian asceti-
cism, on the other hand, discrediting the slightest touch
of sense, has from time to time provoked into strong
emphasis the contrast or antagonism to itself, of the

WINCKELMANN 185

artistic life, with its inevitable sensuousness. I did but
taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in
mine hand, and lo! I must die. It has sometimes
seemed hard to pursue that life without something of
conscious disavowal of a spiritual world ; and this im-
parts to genuine artistic interests a kind of intoxication.
From this intoxication Winckelmann is free: he fingers
those pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with no sense
of shame or loss. That is to deal with the sensuous side
of art in the pagan manner.

The longer we contemplate that Hellenic ideal, in
which man is at unity with himself, with his physical
nature, with the outward world, the more we may be
inclined to regret that he should ever have passed be-
yond it, to contend for a perfection that makes the blood
turbid, and frets the flesh, and discredits the actual world
about us. But if he was to be saved from the ennui
which ever attaches itself to realisation, even the realisa-
tion of the perfect life, it was necessary that a conflict
should come, 0at some sharper note should grieve the
existing harmony, and the spirit chafed by it beat out
at last only a larger and profounder music. In Greek
tragedy this conflict has begun: man finds himself face
to face with rival claims. Greek tragedy shows how
such a conflict may be treated with serenity, how the
evolution of it may be a spectacle of the dignity, not of
the impotence, of the human spirit. But it is not only
in tragedy that the Greek spirit showed itself capable
pf thus bringing joy out of matter in itself full of dis-
couragements. Theocritus, too, strikes often a note of I
romantic sadness. But what a blithe and steady poise,

186 THE RENAISSANCE

above these discouragements, in a clear and sunny strat-
um of the air !

Into this stage of Greek achievement Winckelmann
did not enter. Supreme as he is where his true inter-
est lay, his insight into the typical unity and repose of
the highest sort of sculpture seems to have involved
limitation in another direction. His conception of art
excludes that bolder type of it which deals confidently
and serenely with life, conflict, evil. Living in a world
of exquisite but abstract and colourless form, he could
hardly have conceived of the subtle and penetrative,
yet somewhat grotesque art of the modern world. What
would he have thought of Gilliatt, in Victor Hugo's
Travailleurs de la Mer, or of the bleeding mouth of
Fantine in the first part of Les Miserables, penetrated as
those books are with a sense of beauty, as lively and
transparent as that of a Greek? Nay, a sort of prepara-
tion for the romantic temper is noticeable even within
the limits of the Greek ideal itself, which for his part
Winckelmann failed to see. For Greek religion has not
merely its mournful mysteries of Adonis, 'of Hyacinthus,
of Demeter, but it is conscious also of the fall of earlier
divine dynasties. Hyperion gives way to Apollo, Ocea-
nus to Poseidon. Around the feet of that tranquil
Olympian family still crowd the weary shadows of an
earlier, more formless, divine world. The placid minds
even of Olympian gods are troubled with thoughts of a
limit to duration, of inevitable decay, of dispossession.
Again, the supreme and colourless abstraction of those
divine forms, which is the secret of their repose, is also
a premonition of the fleshless, consumptive refinements
of the pale, medieval artists. That high indifference to

WINCKELMANN 187

the outward, that impassivity, has already a touch of
the corpse in it : we see already Angelico and the Master
of the Passion in the artistic future. The suppression
of the sensuous, the shutting of the door upon it, the
ascetic interest, may be even now foreseen. Those ab-
stracted gods, "ready to melt out their essence fine into
the winds/' who can fold up their flesh as a garment,
and still remain themselves, seem already to feel that
bleak air in which, like Helen of Troy, they wander as
the spectres of the middle age.

Gradually, as the world came into the church, an ar-
tistic interest, native in the human soul, reasserted its
claims. But Christian art was still dependent on pagan
examples, building the shafts of pagan temples into its
churches, perpetuating the form of the basilica, in later
times working the disused amphitheatres as stone quar-
ries. The sensuous expression of ideas which unreserv-
edly discredit the world of sense, was the delicate prob-
lem which Christian art had before it. If we think of
medieval painting, as it ranges from the early German
schools, still with something of the air of the ch#rnel-
house about them, to the clear loveliness of Perugino, we
shall see how that problem was solved. In the very
"worship of sorrow" the native blitheness of art asserted
itself. The religious spirit, as Hegel says, "smiled
through its tears." So perfectly did the young Raphael
infuse that Heiterkeit, that pagan blitheness, into relig-
ious works, that his picture of Saint Agatha at Bologna
became to Goethe a step in the evolution of Iphigenie. 1
But in proportion as the gift of smiling was found once
'* Italianise he Reise. Bologna, 19 Oct. 1776.

188 THE RENATSSANCE

more, there came also an aspiration towards that lost
antique art, some relics of which Christian art had buried
in itself, ready to work wonders when their day came.

The histoy of art has suffered as much as any history
by trenchant and absolute divisions. Pagan and Chris-
tian art are sometimes harshly opposed, and the Renais-
sance is represented as a fashion which set in at a defi-
nite period. That is the superficial view: the deeper
view is that which preserves the identity of European
culture. The two are really continuous ; and there is a
sense in which it may be said that the Renaissance was
an uninterrupted effort of the middle age, that it was
ever taking place. When the actual relics of the an-
tique were restored to the world, in the view of the
Christian ascetic it was as if an ancient plague-pit had
been opened. All the world took the contagion of the
life of nature and of the senses. And now it was seen
that the medieval spirit, too, had done something for the
new fortunes of the antique. By hastening the decline
of art, by withdrawing interest from it and yet keeping
unbroken the thread of its traditions, it had suffered the
human mind to repose itself, that when day came it
might awake, with eyes refreshed, to those ancient,
ideal forms.

The aim of a right criticism is to place Winckelmann
in an intellectual perspective, of which Goethe is the
foreground. For, after all, he is infinitely less than
Goethe; and it is chiefly because at certain points he
comes in contact with Goethe, that criticism entertains
'consideration of him. His relation to modern culture
is a peculiar one. He is not of the modern world ; nor
is he wholly of the eighteenth century, although so much

WINCKELMANN 189

of his outer life is characteristic of it. But that note of
revolt against the eighteenth century, which we detect
in Goethe, was struck by Winckelmann. Goethe illus-
trates a union of the Romantic spirit, in its adventure,
its variety, its profound subjectivity of soul, with Hel-
lenism, in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of
beauty that marriage of Faust and Helena, of which
the art of the nineteenth century is the child, the beau-
tiful lad Euphorion, as Goethe conceives him, on the
crags, in the "splendour of battle and in harness as for
victory," his brows bound with light. 1 Goethe illustrates,
too, the preponderance in this marriage of the Hellenic
element ; and that element, in its true essence, was made
known to him by Winckelmann.

Breadth, centrality, with blitheness and repose, are
the marks of Hellenic culture. Is such culture a lost
art? The local, accidental colouring of its own age has
passed from it; and the greatness that is dead looks
greater when every link with what is slight and vulgar
has been severed. We can only see it at all in the re-
flected, refined light which a great education creates for
us. Can we bring down that ideal into the gaudy, per-
plexed light of modern life?

Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its con-
flicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so
many sorrows, with many preoccupations, so bewildering
an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves, in
blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the
Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not
less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, cen-
trality. It is this which Winckelmann imprints on the
1 Faust, Th. ii.. Act. 3.

190 THE RENAISSANCE

imagination of Goethe, at the beginning of life, in its
original and simplest form, as in a fragment of Greek
art itself, stranded on that littered, indeterminate shore
of Germany in the eighteenth centry. In Winckelmann,
this type comes to him, not as in a book or a theory, but
more importunately, because in a passionate life, in a
personality. For Goethe, possessing all modern inter-
*sts ready to be lost in the perplexed currents of modern
thought, he defines, in clearest outline, the eternal prob-
lem of culture balance, unity with one's self, consum-
mate Greek modelling.

It could no longer be solved, as in Phyrne ascending
naked out of the water, by perfection of bodily form,
or any joyful union with the external world : the shadows
had grown too long, the light too solemn, for that. It
could hardly be solved, as in Pericles or Pheidias, by
the direct exercise of any single talent: amid the mani-
fold claims of our modern intellectual life, that could
only have ended in a thin, one-sided growth. Goethe's
Hellenism was of another order, the Allgemeinheit and
Heiterkeit, the completeness and serenity, of a watchful,
exigent intellectualism. Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren,
resolut zu leben: is Goethe's description of his own
higher life ; and what is meant by life in the whole im
Ganzen? It means the life of one for whom, over and
over again, what was once precious has become indiffer-
ent. Every one who aims at the life of culture is met
by many forms of it, arising out of the intense, laborious,
one sided development of some special talent. They are
the brightest enthusiasms the world has to show: and
It is i/o* their part to weigh the claims which this or that
alien fo*m of genius makes upon them. But the proper

WINCKELMANN 191

instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all
that those various forms of genius can give, as to find
in them its own strength. The deman'd of the intellect
is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the op-
eration, the intellectual reward of every divided form of
culture; but only that it may measure the relation be-
tween itself and them. It struggles with those forms
till its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall
back into its place, in the supreme, artistic view of life.
With a kind of passionate coldness, such natures rejoice
to be away from and p^st their former selves, and above
all, they are jealous of that abandonment to one special
gift which really limits their capabilities. It would have
been easy for Goethe, with the gift of a sensuous nature,
to let it overgrow him. It comes easily and naturally,
perhaps, to certain "other worldly" natures to be even
as the Schone Seele, that ideal of gentle pietism, in Wtt-
helm Meisttr: but to the large vision of Goethe, this
seemed to be a phase of life that a man might feel all
round, and leave behind him. Again, it is easy to in-
dulge the commonplace metaphysical instinct. But a
taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which
we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to ar-
tistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the
fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but
by suggesting questions which help one to detect the pas-
sion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life.

But Goethe's culture did not remain "behind the veil" :
it ever emerged in the practical functions of art, in actual
production. For him the problem came to be : Can the
blitheness and universality of the antique ideal be com-
municated to artistic productions, which shall contain the

192 THE RENAISSANCE

^fulness of the experience of the modern world? We
have seen that the development of the various forms of
art has corresponded to the development of the thoughts
of man concerning humanity, to the growing revelation
of the mind to itself. Sculpture corresponds to the un-
perplexed, emphatic outlines of Hellenic humanism;
painting to the mystic depth and intricacy of the middle
age ; music and poetry have their fortune in the modern
world.

Let us understand by poetry all literary production
which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form,
as distinct from its matter. Only in this varied literary
form can art command that width, variety, delicacy of
resources, which will enable it to deal with the conditions
of modern life. What modern art has to do in the ser-
vice of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern
life, so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit. And
what does the spirit need in the face of modern life?
The sense of freedom. That naive, rough sense of free-
dom, which supposes man's will to be limited, if at all,
only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again.
The attempt to represent it in art would have so little
verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting.
The chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind
concerning itself is the intricacy, the universality of
natural law, even in the moral order. For us, necessity is
not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without
us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic
web woven through and through us, like that magnetic
system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us
with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bear-
ing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent

WINCKELMANN 193

men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give
the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of free-
dom? Certainly, in (Wthe's romances, and even more in
the romances of Victor Hugo, we have high examples
of modern art dealing thus with modern life, regarding
that life as the modern mind must regard it, yet reflect-
ing upon it blitheness and repose. Natural laws we shall
never modify, embarrass us as they may; but there is still
something in the nobler or less noble attitude with which
we watch their fatal combinations. In those romances
of Goethe and Victor Hugo, in some excellent work done
after them, this entanglement, this network of law, be-
comes the tragic situation, in which certain groups of
noble men and women work out for themselves a su-
preme Denouement. Who, if he saw through all, would
fret against the chain of circumstance which endows one
at the end with those great experiences?

CONCLUSION

Aeyei irov *Hp<iucXeiros #ri
To regard all things and principles of things as incon-
stant modes or fashions has more and more become the
tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that
which is without our physical life. Fix upon it in one
of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance,
of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer
heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment
but a combination of natural elements to which science
gives their names ? But those elements, phosphorus and
lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human
body alone : we detect them in places most remote from
it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them
the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the
lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the
brain under every ray of light and sound processes
which science reduces to simpler and more elementary
forces. Like the elements of which we are composed,
the action of these forces extends beyond us : it rusts iron
and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those ele-

1 This brief "Conclusion" was omitted in the second edi-
tion of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead
some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.
On the whole, I have thought it best to reprint it here,
with some slight changes which bring it closer to my
original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the
Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it.

194

CONCLUSION 195

ments are broadcast, driven in many currents ; and birth
and gesture and death and the springing of violets from
the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant
combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and
limb is but an image of ours, under which we group
them a design in a web, the actual threads of which
pass out beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life
has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment
to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their
ways.

Or, if we begin with the inward world of thought and
feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more
eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual
darkening of the eye, the gradual fading of colour from
the wall movements of the shore-side, where the water
flows down indeed, though in apparent rest but the race
of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight
and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems
to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing
upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us
out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But
when reflexion" begins to play upon those objects they
are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force
seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object
is loosed into a group of impressions colour, odour, tex-*
ture in the mind of the observer. And if we continue
to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the
solidity with which language invests them, but of im-
pressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn
and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it
contracts still further: the whole scope of observation
is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual

196 THE RENAISSANCE

mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of im-
pressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that
thick wall of personality through which no real voice has
ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which
we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those
impressions is the impression of the individual in his
isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its
own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still,
and assures us that those impressions of the individual
mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles
down, are in perpetual flight ; that each of them is limited
by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of
them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it
being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend
it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has
ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp
constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single
sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less
fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our
life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with
,the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sen-
sations, that analysis leaves off that continual vanishing
away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of
ourselves. /

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivi~<
ficiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative cul-
ture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it
to a life of constant and eager observation. Every mo-
ment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some
tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest ; some
mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is
irresistibly real and attractive to us, for that moment

CONCLUSION 197

only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself,
is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to
us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in
them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses?
How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and
be present always at the focus where the greatest num-
ber of vital forces unite in their purest energy ?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to main-
tain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might
even be said that our failure is to form habits : for, after
all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime
it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two
persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts
under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite pas-
sion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a
Kfted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any
stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and
curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face
of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some
passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very
brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces
on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to
sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour
of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all
we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall
hardly have time to make theories about the things we
see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever
curiously testing new opinions and courting new im-
pressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of
Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theo-
ries or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism,
may Kelp us to gather up what might otherwise pass un-

198 THE RENAISSANCE

regarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of
thought." The theory or idea or system which requires
of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in con-
sideration of some interest into which we cannot enter,
or some abstract theory we have not identified with
ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real
claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is
that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he de-
scribes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An
undefinable taint of death had clung always about him,
and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten
by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make
as much as possible of the interval that remained; and
he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when
he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement,
which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of
Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnes as Victor Hugo
says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort
of indefinite reprieve les hommes sont tous condamnes
d mort cruec des sursis indefims: we have an interval,
and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this
interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest,
at least among "the children of this world," in art and
song. For our one chance lies in expanding that inter-
val, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the
given time. Great passions may give us this quickened
sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various
forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise,
which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is
passion that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened,
multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic

CONCLUSION 199

passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for ita own
sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly
to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments
as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

1868.

THE END

Modern Library of the World's Best Books
COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN

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ADAMS, HENRY
AIKEN, CONRAD

AIKEN, CONRAD

ANDERSON, SHERWOOD

ARISTOTLE

ARISTOTLE

BALZAC

BALZAC

BEERBOHM, MAX
BELLAMY, EDWARD
BEMELMANS, LUDWIG
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BIERCE, AMBROSE
BOCCACCIO
BRONTE, CHARLOTTE
BRONTE. EMILY
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BUTLER, SAMUEL
BUTLER, SAMUEL
BYRNE, DONN
CALDWELL, ERSKINE
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CANFIELD, DOROTHY
CARROLL, LEWIS
CASANOVA, JACQUES
CELLINI, BENVENUTO
CERVANTES
'CHAUCER

COMMAGER, HENRY STEELE
CONFUCIUS
CONRAD, JOSEPH

CONRAD, JOSEPH

The Education of Henry Adams 76
A Comprehensive Anthology of

American Poetry 101
aoth-Century American Poetry 127
Winesburg, Ohio 104
Introduction to Aristotle 248
Politics 228
Droll Stories 193

Pere Goriot and Eugenie Grandet 245
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Looking Backward 22
My War with the United States 175
The Old Wives' Tale 184
Creative Evolution 231
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The Decameron 71
Jane Eyre 64
Wuthering Heights 106
The C5ood Earth 15
The Life and Works of Beethoven 241
The Arabian Nights 201
Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited 136
The Way of All Flesh 13
Messer Marco Polo 43 <$

God's Little Acre 51
Tobacco Road 249
The Deepening Stream 200
Alice in Wonderland, etc. 79
Memoirs of Casanova 165
Autobiography of Cellini 150
Don Quixote 174
The Canterbury Tales 161
A Short History of the United States 235
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Heart of Darkness
(In Great Modern Short Stories 168)
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CONRAD, JOSEPH
CORNEILLE and RACINE
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DAY, CLARENCE
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DEWEY, JOHN
DICKENS, CHARLES
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DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR
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DOUGLAS, NORMAN
DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN

DREISER, THEODORE
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE
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FAULKNER, WILLIAM
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FIELblNG, HENRY
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FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE
FORESTER, C. S.
FORSTER, E. M.
FRANCE, ANATOLE
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN
FROST, ROBERT
GALSWORTHY, JOHN

GAUTIER, THEOPHILE

GEORGE, HENRY
GLASGOW, ELLEN

Victory 34

Six Plays of Corneille and Racine 194

A History of the Borgias 192

The Red Badge of Courage 130

The Enormous Room 214

Two Years Before the Mast 236

The Divine Comedy 208

Life with Father 230

Moll Flanders 122

Human Nature and Conduct 173

A Tale of Two Cities 189

David Copperfield no

Pickwick Papers 204

Ssven Gothic Tales 54

Three Soldiers 205

Crime and Punishment 199

The Brothers Karamazov 151

The Possessed 55

South Wind 5

The Adventures and Memoirs of Sher-
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Sister Carrie 8

Camille 69

The Three Musketeers 143

Rebecca 227

Peter Ibbetson 207

The Philosophy of Plato 181

The Philosophy of Santayana 224

The Dance of Life 160

Essays and Other Writings 91

The Unvanquished 239

Sanctuary 61

The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay
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Joseph Andrews 117

Tom Jones 185

Madame Bovary 28

The African Queen 1O2

A Passage to India 218

Penguin Island 210

Autobiography, etc. 39

The Poems of 242

The Apple Tree

(In Great Modern Short Stories 168)

Mile. De Maupin and

One of Cleopatra's Nights 53

Progress and Poverty 36

Barren Ground 25

GOETHE
GOETHE

GOGOL, NIKOLAI
GRAVES, ROBERT
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HAMSUN, KNUT
HARDY, THOMAS
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HART AND KAUFMAN
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HENRY, O.
HERODOTUS
HERSEY, JOHN
HOMER
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HUDSON, W. H.
HUDSON, W. H.
HUGHES, RICHARD
HUGO, VICTOR
HUXLEY, ALDOUS
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IRVING, WASHINGTON

JAMES, HENRY
JAMES, HENRY
JAMES, HENRY
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JAMES, WILLIAM
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JEFFERSON, THOMAS
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JOYCE, JAMES

KAUFMAN AND HART
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LAWRENCE, D. H.
LAWRENCE, D. H.
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LEWIS, SINCLAIR
LEWIS, SINCLAIR
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Faust 177

The Sorrows of Werther

(In Collected German Stories 108)
Dead Souls 40
I, Claudius 20
The Maltese Falcon 45
Growth of the Soil 12
Jude the Obscure 13$
The Mayor of Casterbridge 17
The Return of the Native 121
Tess of the D'Urbervilles 72
Six Plays by 233
The Best Stories of 250
The Scarlet Letter 93
Four Plays by 223
A Farewell to Arms 19
The Sun Also Rises 170
Maria Chapdelaine 10
Best Short Stories of 4
The Complete Works of 255
A Bell for Adano 16
The Iliad 166
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The Complete Works of 14!
Green Mansions 89
The Purple Land 24
A High Wind in Jamaica 112
The Hunchback of Notre Dame 35
Antic Hay 209
Point Counter Point 180
A Doll's House, Ghosts, etc. 6
Selected Writings of Washington Irving

240

The Portrait of a Lady 107
The Turn of the Screw 169
The Wings of the Dove 244
The Philosophy of William James 114
The Varieties of Religious Experience 70
Roan Stallion; Tamar and Other

Poems 118

The Life and Selected Writings of 234
Dublioers 124
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man 145
Six Plays by 233
Darkness at Noon 74
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The Collected Snort Stories of ail
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Women in Love 68
Arrows mith 42
Babbitt 162
Dodsworth 252

LONGFELLOW, HENRY W.
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Aphrodite 77

Napoleon 95

The Prince and The Discourses of

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Man's Fate 33
Death in Venice

(In Collected German Stories 108)
The Garden Party 129
The Late George Apley 182
Capital and Other Writings 202
Of Human Bondage 176
The Moon and Sixpence 27
Best Short Stories 98
Disraeli 46

Casuals of the Sea 195
Moby Dick 119
Diana of the Crossways 14
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The Egoist 253

The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci 138
The Complete Poetry and Selected

Prose of John Milton 132
An Anthology of American Negro

Literature 163

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Best Amer. Humorous Short Stories 87
Best Russian Short Stories, including

Bunin's The Gentleman from San

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Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays 94
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Four Famous Greek Plays 158
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Great German Short Novels and

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Great Modern Short Stories 1 68
Great Tales of the American West 238
Outline of Abnormal Psychology 152
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The Making of Man: An Outline of

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The Sex Problem in Modern Society 198
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PEARSON, EDMUND
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KINNAN

READE, CHARLES
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RUSSELL, BERTRAND
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SHEEAN,' VINCENT
SMOLLETT, TOBIAS
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Parnassus on Wheels 190

The Selected Verse of Ogden Nash 191

A Short History of the United States

*35

Thus Spake Zarathustra 9
Oracles of 8 1
Six Plays of 67
The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie and

The Hairy Ape 146
The Long Voyage Home and Seven

Plays of the Sea 1 1 1
The Golden Treasury 232
The Collected Short Stories of 123
The Collected Poetry of 237
Pensecs and The Provincial Letters 164
Marius the Epicurean 90
The Renaissance 86
The Life and Death of a Spanish

Town 225

Studies in Murder 113
Samuel Pepys' Diary 103
The Best of 247
The Satyricon 156
The Philosophy of Plato 181
The Republic 153
Best Tales 82

The Travels of Marco Polo 196
Selected Works of 257
Flowering Judas 88
Cities of the Plain 220
Swann's Way 59
The Captive 120
The Guermantes Way 213
Within a Budding Grove 172

The Yearling 246

The Cloister and the Hearth 62

Ten Days that Shook the World 215

The Life of Jesus 140

Cyrano de Bergerac 154

The Confessions of Jean Jacques

Rousseau 243

Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell 137
The Daring Young Man on the Flying

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The Philosophy of Schopenhauer 52
Tragedies, I, lA complete, 2 vols.
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Histories, 3 I complete, 2 vols.

Histories, Poems, 3A\ * '

Personal History 32
Humphry Clinker 159
Red Star Over China 126
The Philosophy of Spinoza 60

STEINBECK, JOHN
STEINBECK, JOHN
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STEINBECK, JOHN
StENDHAL
STERNE, LAURENCE
STEWART, R. GEORGE
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STONE, IRVING
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SUETONIUS
SWIFT, JONATHAN

SWINBURNE, CHARLES
SYMONDS, JOHN A.
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TCHEKOV, ANTON
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THACKERAY, WILLIAM
THACKERAY, WILLIAM
THOMPSON, FRANCIS
THOREAU, HENRY DAVID
THUCYDIDES
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WALPOLE, HUGH

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WEBB, MARY

WELLS, H. G.

WHARTON,

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WRIGHT,

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In Dubious Battle 115

Of Mice and Men 29

The Grapes of Wrath 148

Tortilla Flat 216

The Red and the Black 157

Tristram Shandy 147

Storm 254

Dracula 31

Lust for Life II

Eminent Victorians 212

Lives of the Twelve Caesars 188

Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, The
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Poems 23

The Life of Michelangelo 49

The Complete Works of 222

Short Stories 50

Sea Gull, Cherry Orchard, Th-ee Sis-
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Henry Esmond 80

Vanity Fair 131

Complete Poems 38

Walden and Other Writings 155

The Complete Writings of 58

Anna Karenina 37

The Sea and the Jungle 99

Barchester Towers and The Warden 41

The Eustace Diamonds 251

Fathers and Sons 21

Ancient Man 105

The Theory of the Leisure Class 63

Including Xhe Aeneid, Eclogues, and
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Candide 47

Fortitude 178

The Compleat Angler 26
'cejctous Bane 219
197

nnocence 229
97

e Profundis 125
iry Tales 84
Wilde 83

.nd Folk Tales 44
179

. _ Anxk (In Collected German Stories 1 08 )

11775